Remember the Golden Age of Midgetry? Just kidding, there was no Golden Age of Midgetry (joke courtesy "The Best Page in the Universe")...but if there was it still wouldn't have been as cool as the Golden Age of the Boombox! When I was a kid the bigger a boombox was the cooler the party was going to be. I knew some guys who had to sell their souls to get a bigger boombox...and now they are partially deaf, and still have those same boxes blairing AC/DC, or BDP.
Myself, I never had a boombox...but I did have the Music Box Dancer on LP, even as a child my manliness was rampant.
What I did have was a buddy who had one of those boxes with a black and white TV in it. It sucked as a boombox and only got crappy snow for the TV. I guess if you lived RIGHT NEXT too the station's tower you could pick up a faint outline of a image. But when you told people that you had a TV in your boombox, then that was all that needed.
The first time I heard LL Cool J, Kool Moe D, and Alabama was on a box (weird mix I know). My Ice T experience was on a cassette tape that was so used the words of the song order were gone. Our weight room in the summer time had a boombox that I knew so well I could hit the fast forward button just the right amount of time to skip over the songs we didn't like.
I guess I'm saying I feel sorry for kids that don't have the boombox experience. They will have had the iPod experience...isolated in their own worlds, never having to share the music with a diverse group of people. See, I was forced to listen to all kinds of music because everyone had to share it. Heavy Metal, Rap, Country, even Blues and some Reggae - everyone had at least one shot of playing what they could force upon the crew. If it made it through one playing...there was a chance you could get it in rotation. I saw more than one fight regarding the music, had the boombox taken away from us several times, and learned to work with and through others to get played what I liked. iPod's, as great as they are - don't force us to interact...just the opposite. They teach us to be selfish...develop our own play-lists and listen too just what we want to listen too. I wish we still played music out loud in areas that forced you to listen to it....it makes you stretch and grow.
Everything but Bluegrass....it just sucks.