”Urban Icon/Icona Urbana”

The boombox is an industrial product that between the second half of the 1970s and the end of 1980s entered the domestic landscape and even more so the urban scenario of the four continents The hybridation of a radio and a cassette recorde with the decisive feature of portability, the boombox become an icon of the generation that came of age in the years of the transition from the pacifist utopias of universal peace and love of the 1960s and early 1970s to the cynical Thatcherian-Reaganian deregulation. Both a technological product and an object of design capable of satisfying practical and immaterial needs, the boombox is equipped with microphones, inputs and outputs for other devices and, with its growing success, also with a double tape deck as well as an impressive number of extras that range from TV screen to synthesizer keyboard. It entered everyone’s homes as a status symbol or as an object of desire, and it soon became an amateur recording studio. Whoever was willing to pursue an artistic career would go so far as to produce demo tapes and bring them to the attention of record companies, yet never before having played them at full volume through powerful woofers and tweeters. In streets, squares, or public places, all sort of music would resonate for the benefit of the community but, turning the circle from virtuous to vicious, also with little respect for other people’s eardrums. In fact, the metropolitan socialization favored by an object that valued communitarian exchange via shared listening had its dark side in the perturbation of public peace and privacy. At the end of the 1980s, the tension between shared listening and collective identity vs. privacy and individuality was solved to the advantage of the latter, but the message associated with the boombox is still alive, as the events following the recent Black Lives Matter movement clearly show.