In Pursuit of Silence (18 page)

Plenty of people before the futurists made noise on purpose, but no one had ever constructed such elaborate and provocative philosophical arguments on its behalf. The futurists proclaimed
noise to be the soundtrack of liberation. We’ve been dubbing that soundtrack over our lives with revolutionary impunity ever since.

The flip side of the futurists’ lust for noise was their loathing of silence. Ancient life was nothing
but
silence, Russolo complained. And the whole of nature was no better. He bemoaned the fact that apart from “exceptional movements across the earth’s surface, such as hurricanes, storms, avalanches, and waterfalls, nature is silent.” Marinetti lumped silence in with what he called the moribund “idealization of exhaustion and rest”—the “rancid romanticism”—that provoked his movement’s first public action on a serene Sunday afternoon in July 1910.

Marinetti and a contingent of his
rat-tat-tat
pack climbed to the top of the clock tower in Venice’s Piazza San Marco. It was no accident that they’d chosen to launch their movement in one of the world’s most famously quiet cities. Leaning over the tower’s balcony, Marinetti’s disciples proceeded to dump
800,000 pamphlets
titled “Against Past-loving Venice” down onto the heads of the bewildered public below, while he howled through a megaphone:
“Enough! Stop whispering
obscene invitations to every mortal passerby, O Venice, old procuress!” The content of the leaflets went further, calling upon Venetians to transform their city into a commercial and military metropolis:
“Burn the gondolas
, those swings for fools, and erect up to the sky the rigid geometry of the large metallic bridges and manufactories with waving hairs of smoke.” One has to admit, it’s got panache.

Of course the futurists didn’t appear out of nowhere. Voices celebrating the noise that man makes in the act of “denaturing” the Earth have existed since the beginning of civilization. The words of William Faux, an English farmer who traveled through
the American west in 1819 to weigh the advantages of resettling there, are typical. Referring to the effect of forest fires lit by the “White Hunters” to help them shoot animals, Faux wrote,
“The everlasting sound
of falling trees … night and day, produces a sound loud and jarring as the discharge of ordnance, and is a relief to the dreary silence of these wilds, only broken by the axe, the gun, or the howlings of wild beasts.” Manmade noise often signals the defeat of nature. What the futurists did was to link this idea with a deeper philosophical mistrust of silence.

Twenty years before the first futurist manifesto, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in
Twilight of the Idols
that he meant to
“
sound out idols
”
with the “hammer” of his philosophical interrogation. Nietzsche’s idols consisted of all those comforting, hypocritical fantasies by which we delude ourselves about the character of the world and mute the healthy energies of the human spirit. Nietzsche expected to be answered by “that famous hollow sound which speaks of inflated bowels—what a delight for one who has ears behind his ears … in presence of whom precisely that which would like to stay silent
has to become audible
.”

Nietzsche’s commitment to broadcasting “that which would like to stay silent” echoes in all those latter-day liberation movements dedicated to “making a noise” about unjust power relationships and giving voice to those who’ve been gagged. Part of why we fell in love with being loud is because quiet is associated with “being silenced” and with being given “the silent treatment.”

This is, of course, a formula for explosion. At the start of the First World War, the futurists were on the vanguard agitating for Italian intervention. In his most regrettable formulation, Marinetti declared war to be the “world’s only hygiene” and wrote a letter
describing his own battlefield experience with unpunctuated ecstasy.
“Cannons gutting space
with a chord
ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB
mutiny of 500 echoes smashing scattering it to infinity … Violence ferocity regularity this deep bass scanning the strange shrill frantic crowds of the battle Fury breathless ears eyes nostrils open! load! fire! what a joy to hear to smell completely
taratatata
of the machine guns screaming a breath less under the stings slaps
traak-traak whips pic-pac-pum-tumb
weirdness …”

Marinetti’s rhapsody to war sounds like the birth of gangster rap.

Of all the sounds that the futurists fired praise upon, the noise of an accelerating car took first prize. Marinetti’s original manifesto records the hour of the movement’s awakening: “We went up to three snorting beasts (cars), to lay amorous hands on their torrid breasts.” The futurists’ launch happened to coincide with the moment when the Italian automobile industry under the leadership of Fiat achieved a level of glamour and commercial importance that made it a European industrial force. While the futurists were rising to prominence,
Rome was becoming
, in the estimation of some, the noisiest city on Earth—because of its car traffic. Marinetti idolized the car as nothing less than the metallic angel of the future’s annunciation: “A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”

Speed. Noise … Noise. Speed. There’s an intrinsic relationship
between the two that the futurists reveled in. After all, it’s when an object vibrates quickly enough that motion becomes sound. A fast-moving life is a noisy life. A powerful machine is supposed to be loud. The ur-connection between acceleration and amplification idles under the hood of the boom-car phenomenon.

Long before there were boom cars, there were drag races. In 1989 Eddie Lopez, a chunky twenty-one-year-old trash collector from Long Beach, became perhaps the first boom-car driver ever to make a direct link between the energy released in racing and that discharged in “booming.” Justifying the $1,200 in noise fines he’d had to fork over to the police, on top of the $5,000 he’d sunk into his vehicle’s audio equipment, Lopez asked a
Los Angeles Times
reporter,
“When hot-rodding
was in, why did you want to speed?”

Hot-rodding is not dead, but there are incalculably more roads today on which it’s possible to boom than to race. And when people’s physical horizons feel constricted, there’s a tendency to want to expand acoustically. Early in the twentieth century, Theodor Lessing, a European writer and philosopher who became a major activist on behalf of silence, had already noted this phenomenon.
“A coachman who
cracks the whip, a maid who shakes out the bedding, a drummer who beats the drum, detect in their noises a personally enjoyable activity and a magnification of their own sphere of power.” Ecce the boom-car driver.

Though the boom box had historical precedents dating back to the 1920s, the loud portable radio—noise in motion—first hit the scene in a big way in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was
then that hip-hop and the boom box exploded together. Immortalized in the hands of Radio Raheem in Spike Lee’s
Do the Right Thing
(the noise of Raheem’s boom box playing Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” inside Sal’s Pizzeria triggers the racial confrontation at the film’s climax), the boom box became a weapon of resistance against the system. It serves as a textbook illustration for how self-expression, when it happens in the form of noise, translates into self-assertion—which in turn threatens property boundaries. The bigger your sound, the more territory you dominate.

Boom cars first began to receive media attention in the late 1980s, when the phenomenon had already been gaining popularity for several years. Contests with
names like “Sound Quake”
and “Thunder on Wheels,” sponsored by car-audio manufacturers looking to promote their “Ground-pounder” products, helped galvanize the fever, and open the wallets, of fledgling boomers like Eddie Lopez. Though it originated in Southern California, it quickly moved east—and almost immediately became subject to hefty fines in multiple states. From the start, boom cars drove people crazy.

But people driving boom cars may have been reacting to a frustration of their own. It was also in the 1980s, according to the Texas Center for Policy Studies and Environmental Defense, that
America’s urban traffic
came definitively to exceed roadway capacity. In the years roughly corresponding to the rise of the boom car, from the early 1980s to 2003,
driving delays in twenty-six
major American cities surged by an astounding 655 percent. I read that number and can’t help thinking of Theodor Lessing’s idea that when people feel caged up, they get loud. Boom-car
fever corresponds with the period in which traffic around the country began grinding to a halt.

That doesn’t change the sense of being under siege experienced by people at home when the boom cars quake by.

For several months, I’d been reading posts on the Listserv of Noise Free America, an antinoise-pollution organization, where boom cars are considered absolute evil. Every few days, Noise Free sends out an e-mail blast linking to a story involving the arrest of someone for assaulting a person who has complained about the noise of his car; or an article about an attack on a police officer who stopped a vehicle for loud music; or the announcement of a new link between boom cars and drug dealers; or details on the discovery of guns inside a boom car. In the accompanying comment threads, boom-car owners are invariably referred to as THUGs or Boom THUGs—and the posts often drip with a bile typified by one that went up the week before I traveled to Tampa.
“These criminals are
the sort of human garbage that are the life’s blood of the boom-car pestilence,” it read. “Unfortunately, it’s not legal to shoot them all and feed their rotting corpses to wolves. The wolves could use the food, and we could use the peace and quiet.” Okay … Unquestionably, the assault by four individuals on one woman is abhorrent. But were the “human garbage” who perpetrated the crime really the “life’s blood of the boom-car pestilence”? I didn’t like the noise of boom cars in my own neighborhood the least little bit. I hate the way my windows rattle when they thump by. By now I’d read droves of articles that led me to empathize with the far more severe suffering that boom-car noise sometimes inflicted on others.
But still I couldn’t help being disturbed by the off-the-road rage I encountered in the echo chamber of the Listserv.

By contrast, the forums of the boom-car enthusiasts were relatively quiet. Indignation was certainly expressed on FloridaSPL about antinoise legislative efforts, but their biggest complaint was the way all boom-car owners were lumped together. There were even occasional surprising metaphysical disquisitions on the site, such as a posting under the “Rants” category by
CalusaCustom-Concepts
titled “Who Cares About Words?” which began, “Do words have any meaning? Are the words we use important? What are words anyway? Aren’t words the translation of the concepts we imagine? If words are concepts translated into sounds with assigned meanings, then words are expressed ideas.”