Sonic Earthquakes

This is an ethnographic study of youths who put elaborate sound systems in their automobiles. I argue that participants in loud car stereo culture share an aesthetic agency, using sound and mobility to construct environments (discussed in this article as mobile heterotopias) that challenge the spatial and temporal constraints of daily life. Their actions and stories speak to, and exist within, broader contemporary debates in the United States about music and noise in public places. Moreover, their sonic booms confront and undermine official attempts to regulate contemporary life and to sanitize public spaces.