Getting your first boombox is fucking epic indizeed! Smack me in the face with a dead baby if I wasn’t bumpin’ the “Never Ending Story” soundtrack like a set trippin’ banga’ during the perfunctory, seventh annual celebration of my falling out of Mom’s vag. Banging. The. Fuck. Out. Of. It. The Panasonic, not my Mom’s vag, you silly goose. My brain says there was something about cake and touchy, feely old ladies filling my nose holes with the wonky chemicals of their perfume as they kissed me all over my face. I don’t know exactly, but there can be no doubt whatsoever though that those six D-cells feeding this monster were fuckin’ dead with the quickness. That’s just how it goes when you’re the man about town with the sounds.
You know your kid’s gonna have whatever stereo they get first for a long time, so please, don’t be a dick. At least give them something with an EQ.
After about 63 months of bangin’ hard, the old Panasonic fell ill and I had to bury that ass in the backyard next to Vern’s jar of pennies. What came next would power the lightbulb I had been wearing above my head since my Mom shat me out. This new boombox had not one, but two tape decks. Not only could I now steal music 2.5x faster thanks to the magic of high-speed dubbing, but wait, there’s more! And if you act now, I’ll double your earful of nonsense about how this thing could play both decks at once! At the same volume too! Holy shit! At 13, I was one of those bedroom DJ kids dropping science as best I could with what I had. Eventually, Mom hooked me up with an old school Technics tape deck so I could record the shitty mixes no one would ever want to listen to but me. Over and over again. For hours. And then a few more times for good measure. I actually enjoyed my shit better than a lot of everything else. My brain made that stuff for my brain, so the resonance was perfect. It was crazy fun playing The KLF with Opus III or recording sound from the Back to the Future II VHS to layer over some dark & dirty beats from my Underground Rave tapes, the sick tune from the My Little Pony commercial or whatever else made cool noises like the Speak-n-Spell.
Even back then, I was beyond sick of hearing the same Led Zeppelin and Eagles songs 9 times a day for 13 years straight. That stuff made me wanna gouge my fucking eardrums out with a rusty coat hanger while kicking puppies in the dick. As it turned out, there was other music in the world. Better music. Some seriously epic tunes, actually, the kind of awesome shit that keeps my brain from shutting down in protest. Jungle, drum-n-bass, breakbeats, new wave rarities, shoegazer dreams, NES Midi themes and the sound effects from UFO documentaries all served me well. Sometimes all at once.
And then, this one time, at band camp, I mixed a track using 24 different sources that required about 5 different tapes to be swapped around. It was a fucking mess, but every bit as brilliant as those silly looking teeth you see on people in gum commercials. Before too long, I had about 150 tapes packed leader to leader with sick beats and samples that no one else was using. It turns out most people just couldn’t wrap their minds around the bulk of any of it that actually was good. Probably the same type of people who kill themselves in the subway because they just can’t take any more of Call Me Maybe or that fucking annoying whistle song. You know the one I’m talking about. Fuck that stupid song.
Just about any time I have to hear stupid fucking songs like that in a seamless loop for months in a row, I want to be dead too. A hammer is pretty hard to come by at a subway station, but your fists will work too in an audio emergency. The trick is to keep punching until everything looks funny and your brain turns off. Then, the ugly sounds just sort of fade away. It’s quite nice. Obviously though, the more productive choice is simply to make your own sound. Fo’ sho’. Mixers are cheap and I think everybody should have one. Toying with music isn’t rocket science and there’s no accounting for taste so you can just do whatever the fuck you want with no regard whatsoever for the fragile and illegitimate feelings of other remarkably forgettable people. Well, that is unless you’re stuck in an apartment where the need for silence “just because” somehow always seems to find favor with the manager who bangs on your fucking door to bitch because it’s after 5pm and he can sort of hear some music. It’s perfectly acceptable though that those little shit kids are still smashing and banging around in the fucking hallway after 11.
80sDreamer-(^_^)/ 