Man with boombox and homemade strap in the UK. 1980.Kerstin Rodgers/Redferns/Getty Images
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Portrait of two young men as they pose in a graffiti-covered subway car. New York. 1980.Jamel Shabazz/Getty Images
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A young man sits on his bicycle with his boombox. Cairo, Illinois. 1985.Visions of America/UIG via Getty Images
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Rapper LL Cool J holds a boombox outside of a concert. 1986.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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Young men and their boombox. Newark, New Jersey. 1987.Visions of America/UIG via Getty Images
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A young man poses with his boombox on a sidewalk in Brooklyn. 1985. Jamel Shabazz/Getty Images
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Breakdancer and boombox. Location unspecified. Circa 1990s.PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images
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Bruce Springsteen fans have a picnic with a boombox in the trunk. Location unspecified. 1985. Ebet Roberts/Redferns/Getty Images
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A smiling teenager with a boombox stands outside an African-American youth center in Harlem. July 7, 1984.Owen Franken/Corbis via Getty Images
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Suspected gang members stand with their hands on their heads and their boomboxes at their feet in Los Angeles. June 10, 1988.Jean Marc Giboux/Liaison/Getty Images
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Teddy Boys in Tokyo's Harajaku Park. 1986.PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images
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Three young men pose on a street on the Lower East Side of New York. 1982.Jamel Shabazz/Getty Images
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Breakdancers on 5th Avenue in New York. 1981. PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images
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A young man in roller skates and a pith helmet in New York City. 1970. Erika Stone/Getty Images
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Man with a boombox walking among a crowd at the Taste of Chicago festival. July 3, 1988.David Dapogny/Chicago History Museum/Getty Images
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Hip-hop duo Gang Starr (DJ Premier, left, and Guru). San Fransisco. 1991. Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images
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Two teenagers in Adidas tracksuits with a heavily-customized boombox at a UK Fresh Hip Hop event. 1986.PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images
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UK Fresh Hip Hop event in Wembley, London. 1986. PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images
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Man with boombox on a Harlem street. 1986.David Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images
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Three teenage boys pose together in New York's Times Square. 1987.Barbara Alper/Getty Images
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A group of young men pose with a boombox on a subway platform. New York. 1983.Jamel Shabazz/Getty Images
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A group of young men walk through New York's Central Park. Date unspecified. Karl Weatherly/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images
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A young man poses with a boombox on a sidewalk in Brooklyn. 1980. This boombox features a turntable for LPs.Jamel Shabazz/Getty Images
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Man walking down the street with his boombox. New York City. 1980.PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images
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Performers take part in street cabaret event to preview International Women's Day. Location unspecified. March 1997. Teesside Archive/Mirrorpix/Getty Images
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Men with boombox repairing a car in the South Bronx, New York. Date unspecified.Visions of America/UIG via Getty Images
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Protester at "Freedom to Party" demonstration carrying a boombox. Trafalgar Square, London. 1990. PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images
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Young man leans on graffiti-covered wall holding boombox. UK. 1990.Mick Hutson/Redferns/Getty Images
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A teenager holding his boombox on New York's 42nd Street. 1980.PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images
Vintage Photos From The 1980s Glory Days Of The Boombox
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In his The Boombox Project: The Machines, the Music, and the Urban Underground, Canadian photographer and author Lyle Owerko calls the once-ubiquitous boombox a "sonic campfire" and "the eighties equivalent of Spotify -- a conduit through which music was shared."
It's hard to imagine any contemporary, Spotify-equipped device as analogous to a campfire, sonic or otherwise. But the Spotify comparison does speak to the boombox's small-scale social media-like power, decades before the term "social media" was even coined.
In one interview, Owerko opined that the boombox was "a metaphor for free speech ... a metaphor for empowerment." Boomboxes were also "borderless," he said; despite the connection to hip-hop luminaries such as LL Cool J, who proudly displayed his JVC RC-M90 on the cover of Radio, rock and punk acts also embraced boomboxes as emancipatory tools, for reasons both low- and highbrow.
"You were no longer trapped to an AC outlet," Don Letts of iconic 1980s post-punk act Big Audio Dynamite told The New York Times in 2010. "You could take it to the streets, and wherever you took it, you had an instant party."
The boombox also transcended musical genre and politics to become both a pop culture icon and an affordable way to get high-quality music wherever you wanted it; as Owerko notes: "You know, it extended around the globe ... it was wherever people wanted to listen to music, whether it was a beach cafe, in a mechanic's shop, in an artist's studio."
But boomboxes also served as status symbols. "Back in the day they were also a form of conspicuous consumption: some cost $700 or more," notes journalist Ben Sisario. "I remember some boxes so big, they required 20 D-size batteries to an already heavy box," Fred Brathwaite, a.k.a. artist and musician Fab 5 Freddy, told NPR in 2009. "So these boxes were so heavy that some cats that would carry their boxes all the time, they would develop massive forearms and biceps."
But with the advent of Sony's portable and stylish Walkman, the beastly box's days were soon numbered. The Consumer Electronics Association says that only 329,000 proper vintage boombox models (i.e., without CD players) were shipped in the U.S. in 2003. In 1985, that number had approached 25 million.
The gallery of vintage boombox photos above showcases these machines in urban environments across the globe, in their heyday and in their waning years, right before portability and personal soundscapes beat out the communal, "sonic campfire" experience of the bold and beautiful boombox.
After this look at vintage boombox photos, take an often terrifying photographic tour of New York City in the 1970s and 1980s. Then, check out some of the most vibrant 1980s street scenes from legendary New York photographer Jamel Shabazz.
Kellen Perry is a veteran writer on topics including television, history, music, art, video games, and food. His work has also appeared on Grunge, Ranker, and Looper.
John Kuroski is the editorial director of All That's Interesting. He graduated from New York University with a degree in history, earning a place in the Phi Alpha Theta honor society for history students. An editor at All That's Interesting since 2015, his areas of interest include modern history and true crime.
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Perry, Kellen. "Vintage Photos From The 1980s Glory Days Of The Boombox." AllThatsInteresting.com, July 26, 2017, https://allthatsinteresting.com/vintage-boombox-photos. Accessed February 23, 2025.
