Free In Pursuit of Silence by George Prochnik Page A

so it happened that at nine on a Saturday night late in the spring I found myself standing in a parking lot outside Tampa staring through chain-link fencing at a patch of tall reeds that waved back and forth like a metronome, listening to the drone of I-75, waiting for a call from MP3 Pimp. The call came, and I bolted for my vehicle, heading to a Shell station across the roadfrom a Hooters restaurant, in search of a tangerine-colored vehicle with a fractured windshield.
BOOM-ERANG
    When I reached the station and spotted the one orange car, I thought there’d been some mistake. The vehicle was hardly bigger than a Matchbox car. This could not be the machine of a Boom THUG. The hose was stuck in the tank and there was no one behind the wheel. I got out of my car and walked closer. The windshield was, indeed, finely cracked in many places, creating an effect, in the overhead fluorescence, of delicate ice-crystal calligraphy. A moment later, a large man in long shorts pushed out of the station store, sucking meditatively on a tall soft drink.
    Robin Butler, aka MP3 Pimp , is an ample man in his mid-twenties, with honey skin, light eyes, and a softly curling beard. He looks like a biblical patriarch, only gentler and more self-conscious. We shook hands, and he invited me into the car. The second I yanked open the door on the passenger side (it was broken) and swung in, I realized I was entering a whole new realm. This was not a car interior in any sense I’d ever experienced. Everything had been stripped of its original elements and reconstituted Frankenstein-style—swollen with foam, fiberglass, black speakers, and a profusion of colorful wires. The entire rear half of the car was obscured by immense black audio equipment; the dashboard seemed to consist only of dark metal cavities, coils, and protrusions with a little digital box at the epicenter, like the control panel of a retro-sci-fi vessel. MP3 Pimp turned on the engine. I reached across for my seat belt.
    “No belts,” MP3 Pimp commented. I glanced down at the torn sockets by my hips, and we pulled out onto the highway.
    As we drove, MP3 Pimp occasionally reached up two fingers to push back the duct tape propping different sections of the windshield to prevent them from falling across our laps. I asked him what had triggered his involvement with car audio.
    “Just hearing people with bass driving around—just ever since I can remember hearing it, I remember responding to that sound. And I’ve had something since I was seventeen. Nine years. But as for something as ridiculous as this … maybe two years.”
    And was it really true that his windshield had cracked because of sound?
    “Yup,” he nodded. “Fourth windshield this year. See these dents in the metal?” He pointed up at the ceiling. “Also audio-related.”
    And what is the police response? I inquired.
    He shrugged. “They don’t really bother you too much, as long as you’re respectful. If you drive by a cop with your music on and you turn it down when you see him, he knows it’s you, but you’re being respectful. They might pull you over to check your registration, make sure everything’s in order, but as long as you’re being respectful, it’s okay.” He told me that the people who participated in the shows were rarely the ones creating a public nuisance.
    “So the ones creating the problem are a minority?” I ventured.
    “Well—actually,” MP3 Pimp hesitated. “No. The people who go to shows—most of us are respectable. They call it ‘bumping responsibly’ … But you get the kids: they have a loud system in their cars, and they want everybody to know, so they play it loud all the time. Unfortunately, they’re in the majority because a lotof people who have car stereos don’t come to shows. They don’t even know the shows exist. Some people do it for fun. Some people just like it loud, like me. And some people do it to impress other people, like girls or whatever. Some people