Boombox and the City

The boombox is one of the accessories of mass culture which became an icon of hip hop between the end of the seventies and the first half of the eighties. Present on five continents, as suggested by its Antarctic appearance in John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), this consumer product soon became a distinctive feature of the urban landscape. Because if in showbiz it is the trademark of Van Halen and the Clash, before becoming that of LL Cool J and Public Enemy, and in everyday life, together with the Walkman and the skateboard, the totemic object of post-adolescence, in metropolitan suburbs it is the identy signature of ghetto subculture. In the Bronx, as pointed out by Spike Lee in the retrospective narration of Do the Right Thing (1989), it is the trademark of both the the Hispano-American and the African-American communities. The volume presents texts and images that originate in an interdisciplinary didactic experiment on street culture and narration of urban places. It also collects the proceedings from a conference (“Radio-Active. Urban Space in Motion”) held in Catania in 2018 as part of the exhibition "Boombox and the City. An exhibition and four events," to which a section of the book is devoted. Essays, testimonies, graphic tables, photograms and photographs document the research work and the output of the educational project created by Sicilian and Calabrian university students and scholars around what is only apparently a relic of the age of plastic and disengagement — especially if one thinks that, in the XXI century, from Madonna's and Lady Gaga's videoclips to the amplified speakers of smartphones, the boombox is presently living a second youth in the name of an unexpected yet compelling resurgence.