Does anyone remember when Ghetto Blasters were cool? The bigger they were the cooler they were. If they were big enough you could own a street corner in the ghetto. They took like 12-24 D batteries and the good ones had dual cassette tape players.
word but it scared me all the time when i was a kid like some sort of 4 foot cat walks by and throws some painting on a brick wall
The best one I ever owned, circa 1975, was stolen at a party while I was setting up a sound system. Had a brand new Black Sabbath tape in it too. x
I lived by a city and remember all the people walking around with huge ghetto blasters. I asked my GF if she knew what they were the other day (she is from a small hick town) she said they only called them boom boxes, probably because they don’t have ghettos where she is from. I never had a fancy one my parents were cheap I had one like this in the 80s.
Haha...I never knew why they called em "ghetto blaster" either...Im a hick too I guess....I remember near the end they started putting all kinds of flashing lights on them
Ahhh man. Those were the days. They were perfect breakdancing equipment too. =D We always carried those and a cardboard. Marius
The original Saturday Night Live back in the 70s had a weekend update news story spoof about ghetto blasters. They showed some dude walking down the street with a huge ghetto blaster on his shoulder. The news story read, "The recently lost Telstar satellite was found today by a native New Yorker. Stated the finder, 'this thing picks up so many stations and plays so loud I ain't giving it back to nobody.'" .
What I most remember about them: people turned them up so loud that everything was distorted to the point that it was just random square waves jarring their empty, resonating (and perhaps resinating) skull. But that was supposed to be... kewl.
What about that scene in Bad Boys (with Sean Penn) where someone planted a bomb in that inmate's boom box and it blew up his head. .
I had one and we called them gettoblaster's too, although there are no getto's around here. It was the biggest one at school when I was in grade 7, but a couple were bigger when I was in grade 8. Everybody would try and compete for the loudest at school during lunch and recess, up to a dozen or two dozen all blasting at the same time all playing different tapes. It took 12 D batteries and I had rechargable batteries for it. It had a 5 band equalizer, 2 small rows of red led's to show the dB's, AM/FM/shortwave tuner and stereo AUX input. It was a double tape player so you could take all your favorite songs from each of your tapes and put them all on a 90 minute tape. I tried a couple 120 minute tapes but they were too thin and always got eaten after a couple of times of playing them. I learned how to splice them back together though. I would tape songs off the radio too and they sounded good and were in stereo, unlike my early radio tapings which were made by placing my little tape recorder beside the speaker of a radio and trying to be quiet so you didn't get to much back ground noise. Those always sounded like shit and of course were only mono.
I remember those lights. My friend had one with a built in strobe light, it also had a motion detector burglar alarm.