Jonathan Takiff: 'The Boombox Project' recounts how young hip-hop and punk musicians used them to create music

MANY PEOPLE give props to computers and the Internet for democratizing culture and technology, putting independent artists and hackers on an almost equal footing with the biggest names in showbiz.

But hey, what about the boom box?

The roots of tech empowerment and DIY culture can clearly be traced to the music-blasting boxes of the latter 1970s and '80s, newly celebrated in photographer/collector Lyle Owerko's profusely illustrated book "The Boombox Project" (Abrams Image, $24.95).

Home recording? Time shifting? Peer-to-peer content transfer? Street team marketing?

For many traveling in hip-hop, punk and new wave music circles, it all began with a portable sound system variously tagged a boom box, ghetto blaster (for its inner-city popularity), beatbox or, in Britain, a Brixton briefcase. Essentially, we're talking a battery- or AC-powered system you could sling sometimes on your shoulder, move on the fly, blast on a street corner or in the park to share the newest sounds or create your own.

TAPE CULTURE: In gathering vintage boom boxes from collectors for his visual history and chatting it up with box-toting artists like Kool Moe Dee, LL Cool J, Fab 5 Freddy, Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys and Rosie Perez, Owerko found "very few talking about the radio section of the boxes."

"For the most part, radio wasn't playing what they wanted to hear," except maybe for the global music-sampling, box-celebrating, punk-rocking Clash, Owerko agreed in our recent chat.

The ability of heavy-duty sound blasters to be heard a city block away and the head-turning power of the bass clearly appealed to users, the author found. "But what was universally interesting was the fact that a boom box came with a cassette transport - for playing music in motion - or even better a double cassette, which allowed for tape-to-tape mixing and duplication," Owerko said.

"The cassette mechanism allowed users to express their personal taste, either making mix tapes [collections copied from multiple sources] or pause tapes [rudimentary edits of songs playing on the radio]. They also talked a lot about the power of sharing tapes with friends. This was peer-to-peer networking on a primitive level.