Batteries Not Included
Today they appear like two-eyed anthropological finds, but some people—like photographer Lyle Owerko—aren't ready to trade in their boomboxes for an iPod.
Michael Ruffino
March 18, 2008
I’ve been collecting these since I was in my teens,” says self-confessed pop-culture junkie Lyle Owerko, indicating the phalanx of boomboxes in his SoHo apartment. “They’re from all over the world—Calgary, Japan, thrift stores in Los Angeles, flea markets in Africa. And some I bought from the stores that usually sold them, back when.” Owerko has been a devotee of youth culture, and of music, from the moment he feasted his eyes on the album art of his first record purchase, at 11 years old: Ted Nugent’s Scream Dream. “It was an epiphany,” he says. The “Nuge” has that effect.
A music fanatic, Owerko, 39, hasn’t stopped collecting boomboxes since the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” made it to his hometown of Calgary. From the era of the mix tape to the iPod, uncountable models of different shapes, sizes, and vintages have “passed through his life,” but his collection now is centered around 40 boomboxes that are vintage late ’70s and early ’80s makes, and, for the most part, can be described as, well, very, very large. And used.
As a noted socio-political photographer, he’s used them in umpteen shoots, bringing one on tour in Japan for Island/Def Jam rock artists American Hi-Fi. In a frenzy of tour finale angst, that box was ceremonially sacrificed, à la Pete Townsend, by Hi-Fi singer Stacey Jones, leaving a Godzilla-sized hole in the stage. Japanese fans screamed in approval—as they do, in deafening unison—and the papers printed pictures of the moment, now Japanese rock ’n’ roll history.
Owerko has documented his for the masses (and posterity), this time through a body of work that is equal parts fine art and street art, a celebration of an era and a machine in perfect sync. The detailed photographs of “ghettoblasters,” some of them pictured here, render them “as sexy as a sports car and as solemn and meditative as an ancient Buddha statue,” says Owerko. “They’re objects of desire and reverence”—fitting them nicely enough into James Joyce’s definition of pornography.
As the rapper The Blueprint sang on his track, “Boombox,” off his album, 1988: “My boombox/ fully equipped/ with a microphone jack whenever cats want to spit/ Wherever I’m at, the B-boys follow/ My box turns bus stops into the Apollo.”
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