Speaker Terror Upper: When Bass Tapes shook the streets

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Warning.

Listening to this episode at high volume may result in seriously booty-shaking levels of bass.

20,000 Hertz is not responsible for any damage to car speakers, headphones, or other listening devices.

You're listening to 20,000 Hertz.

I'm Dallas Taylor.

Growing up in the 80s and early 90s, I have this very distinct memory of cars driving slowly around my neighborhood, blasting the loudest, boomiest music I'd ever heard.

I remember the music was on these cassette tapes that all had bass in the name.

There were titles like Nothing But Bass, Bass Boom Bottom, and It Came from Outer Bass.

And while I never got into this scene myself, I knew a few people who were all about it.

For a few years, this bass tape subculture seemed huge, and then it just seemed to disappear.

But I've always been curious, what was this phenomenon?

Where did it come from?

And what happened to it?

To find out, I reached out to producer and writer Marissa Flaxbart.

Hey, Dallas.

I'm excited to tell you what I've discovered on the topic of 90s base tapes.

I'm very excited about that because it's just a distant memory from my brain.

That sounds like a perfect study and examination for our nerdy little podcast.

I totally agree.

So it's actually not all that surprising that you say, oh, I have a memory of this, a distant memory, but I don't know that much about it because it's almost as if it hasn't exactly been studied and examined as the phenomenon that it clearly was.

Interesting.

The story of bass tapes is a convergence of things that were happening in the mid to late 80s.

For starters, there was this massive proliferation of hip-hop.

And in South Florida, there was a sub-genre of hip-hop that was starting to take hold called Miami bass.

As far as the musical innovation of bass music, that really happens in Miami.

That's music writer Jesse Serwer, who's written several pieces about this topic.

Miami being a place that's very much connected to the Caribbean, specifically Jamaica is a place where bass is prized.

And a lot of the originators of Miami bass are Jamaican.

are from that part of the Caribbean.

At house parties, dance clubs, and in the streets, people were building towers of speakers and relishing in the way those bass sound waves shook their bodies and the neighborhood.

It's definitely born in that Miami era, that lawless era that we see in Miami vice.

It's almost like a comic book or a cartoon now, the way it's been embedded into culture, this outlaw Miami era.

Miami bass definitely is a product of that, and the bass is the heart of that.

The biggest group to come out of this lawless Miami scene was probably Two Live Crew.

Their unapologetically raunchy lyrics helped lead to those parental advisory labels on tapes and CDs.

And their songs were driven by low, bumping bass tones.

Here's a 1988 track called Move Something.

The rising popularity of bass wasn't just a cultural movement.

It was also a technological one.

The bass sounds and tracks like Move Something, as well as tons of other hip-hop from that time, were created with a legendary drum machine called the Roland TR-808.

The 808 revolutionizes bass.

Bass before the 808 is a bass guitar.

When the makers of the Roland TR-808 digitized the sound of the kick drum, it gives people who are using it a whole new way to use bass.

Crucially, the 808 had a knob to adjust the decay of the kick drum.

And when you cranked it to the right, it stretched those punchy thumps into long, sustained bass notes.

That's really the core of Miami bass, manipulating the decay and sustaining the kick drum sound.

But there was another factor that was just as important for this movement.

The second technological development is the rise of aftermarket car stereo systems, which starts to a degree in the 70s, maybe even earlier, but it really comes alive, like it really becomes an industry with its own language and culture in the mid-1980s.

The key word here is aftermarket, meaning this is not the factory audio system that comes with your car.

In the mid-80s, the basic car stereo was just an AM-FM radio and a set of speakers that were relatively weak, especially in the bass department.

For people who were used to the high-end stereos they had at home or the stacks of speakers that blasted in clubs and at block parties, those dinky car setups just weren't going to cut it.

Soon enough, manufacturers started to give people what they wanted, pumping out powerful car speakers and subwuffers.

But if you're going to spend all of that money to make your car stereo sound amazing, you'll want to be able to choose the music you hear in it.

So you'll also want a cassette player.

1979 is the year that the Walkman was introduced commercially.

So they won't make the Walkman from Sony the one and only.

So you're going to be walking around listening to cassette tapes.

You're going to be listening to cassette tapes at home.

So why not listen to cassette tapes in your car?

With each of these new innovations, another piece of the puzzle falls into place.

The people who are listening to Miami bass in the mid-1980s, they are listening to it in a car and they are often listening to it at very high volumes.

And that's one of the cool things about how Miami Bass develops is that the music and the systems start to be like advertisements for each other.

On a physics level, low frequencies travel farther than high frequencies do.

So these cars could be heard from blocks away.

They were impossible to ignore, which was a big part of the appeal.

Not only are you creating a bass sound, but you're creating a rattling on the chrome of the vehicles at the time.

So you're doing this to be known.

You know, you're making a statement with the music you're playing, how you're playing it.

I can't wait for people who listen to 20,000 Hertz with their kids and they're, you know, suburban folks driving around in minivans, listening with the kids, and their car is going to be rattling due to our podcast.

You're welcome.

Yes, yes.

A service that we can provide.

There was a name for this new breed of loud bass bumping vehicles, boom cars.

Already by 1987, 1988, there's a very close connection between Miami-bass music and boom cars.

And this is most famously paid tribute to by Latrim, who scored one of the first national bass crossover hits that hit the billboard charts.

Latrim's big hit was called Cars That Go Boom.

They're always adding speakers when they find the room.

Cause they know we love the guards with the cards that go boom.

We like the cars, the cars that go boom.

We're acting girls and money and we like the boom.

People kind of treat it lightly, but like that is a very accurate song.

Guys look at having these loud cars as a way to get girls' attention, and they did.

Hey, girl.

Hey.

The success of Latrim helped spread the boom car scene from the streets of Miami to cities and towns all across the country.

Meanwhile, other Miami artists started pushing the limits of bass further and further.

And one of the biggest was DJ Magic Mike.

So when he starts making music, he's got a group called the Royal Posse.

They're just making Miami bass music.

But very soon that's going to change for him because he creates a record called Drop the Bass.

The bass magic is controlling, and it'll work that way.

So, let me see it sway.

Because I'm room with the boomers when you order state.

Your mic lets me out of this place.

I think it's time you drop that bass.

In 1989, Drop the Bass became the song to test your new car stereo with.

You know, it has a section to like really focus on that 808 whoosh sound, that sustained sound.

Drop the bass was a really really really big song for me and us.

That's Mike Hampton also known as DJ Magic Mike.

Once his music got people hooked on bass, they just couldn't get enough.

So what wound up happening is someone took drop the bass and it slowed it way down.

And they said that when they slowed it down, it was more bass in the song.

Well, me being an artist, I didn't like my song being slowed down.

I just, it didn't sound good to me.

So, the engineer that I had in the studio at the time, I told him what was going on, and he says, We can do something about that.

He says, Let's work on something.

So, we got in the studio and we did a slowed-down bass track called Feel the Bass.

There it is, bass.

That's what I remember a lot of.

It's just people saying bum bada bum bada bum bada bass.

Bum bada bum bada bum bada bass.

Like most of the lyrics were somebody saying bass.

Yes, and something that is important to note about Feel the Bass is that it has a subtitle and it's speaker terror upper.

Terror, like scary terror upper.

And that was the promise of Feel the Bass.

We called the speaker terror upper because the way we designed the song, if you slowed that song down, it would literally tear your speakers up because the air would get behind the speaker and blow the coil out and it was just kind of like a joke at first like okay let's see what happens and feel the bass just blew up

did you ever hear about anybody tearing up their speakers with the song Oh, constantly.

If I had a penny for every time I heard that every day, I'd be millionaire times and times over.

It's just every single day, whether, you know, it's me and my wife working or we're out somewhere.

Man, your music tore my speakers up.

You tore my speakers up.

Like, no, I didn't tear your speakers up.

You tore your speakers up.

The destructive power of pure, unadulterated bass only served to make this music more exciting.

Now there was an element of danger to it, of a dare.

I dare you to play this tape in your car.

It all added to this image of glamorous rebellion.

As a child of the 90s, I know from first-hand experience is part of the joy in this entire thing is because old people hated it.

Yes, absolutely.

There were special reports on the news about the scourge of teens riding around with their bass rattling and their music blasting.

Trouble is, if you don't roll the windows up as Leslie does, innocent bystanders can feel Michael Jackson in their teeth too, which is why some California police have taken to issuing citations for noise pollution.

We get complaints from the citizens, we get complaints from businessmen, and it's deafening.

The sound is deafening.

We like that cars.

That cars take

by the early 90s, the boom car scene had become a kind of sonic arms race.

On the one side, you had DJs and engineers pushing bass frequencies to deeper and deeper depths.

On the other, you had people tricking out their cars with boomier and boomier sound systems.

Tons of people got in on the action, including plenty of 20,000 hertz listeners.

I was one of those guys that had one of those cars that you could hear from two or three blocks away.

There was one bass tape that was feared, revered, and asked for more than any other.

It was truly like contraband.

That's coming up after the break.

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Since she couldn't create a realistic sound using the game's hardware, she composed this loopable melody, which starts and stops stops along with the player's movements.

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In the early 90s, boom cars were all over America, blasting thunderous Miami bass songs designed to show off just how low their speakers could go.

Like me, many of our listeners remember the bass craze fondly.

In fact, plenty of them joined in on it.

In Metro Detroit, on the northeast side, there's a boulevard called Grashit.

And what you did in your formative years in the early 90s was you got in your friends' cars and cruised Grashit.

You would go from about 10 mile to 12 mile and just go in loops.

And you would talk to girls.

You would show off how loud your bandhask box was or your bass system was.

I remember being a teenager in the mid-90s looking through the Crutch Field magazines, looking at all the new amps, boxes, enclosures, and different types of speakers, dreaming of what that might be one day to put some of those in my 1988 Mercury Tracer hatchback.

I was one of those guys that had one of those cars that you could hear from two or three blocks away.

I had two 15-inch sub-officing trunk.

I had a total of, I think, 16 speakers throughout the car.

And the car car was so loud that sometimes we would be rolling down the street not only would it be rattling the windows of the car and the trunk but we actually be setting off car alarms as we rode down the street

there was this guy in my high school who had like a secret notebook and each page of the notebook had a track listing for a different cassette tape that he would make for you and sell you so for like five bucks you could get your own mixtape with songs like bass mechanic or give the dj a break

It was truly like contraband.

Yeah, I mean, it really was like a high school endeavor.

Somebody you hear in the parking lot at high school blasting this.

What's that about?

Talk about it in school.

Duplicate the cassette tape, put it in your car, realize your car is terrible.

Go spend your teenage job money all into a nice radio system

that plugged into like an amplifier and a subwoofer and among the teenagers who were trading these tapes around certain titles earned a reputation for being especially dangerous

back in the day I used to work at this store at the Briarwood Mall in Ann Arbor Michigan called tape world

and there was one bass tape that was feared and revered and asked for more than any other.

And I think the guy's name was DJ Billy E.

And it was called Nightmare on Bass Street.

And there was a track on it called Ultimate Bass Scare.

And it would just get lower, like every four or six beats or so, it would get lower and lower

and lower and lower.

And apparently, it blew out a couple people's speakers as they were trying to play the ultimate bass scare challenge.

After a while, I started warning people that when they came in asking for Nightmare on Bass Street, I would say, listen, be careful when you play Ultimate Bass Scare because it will mess up your car stereo.

Remember that heat flash and compression methods are dangerous.

Nightmare on Bass Street was the first release by a new label called Innovative Bass Productions.

It was founded by a man named Ed Firestone, who worked as a sales rep for a subwoofer company.

He was one of those people that noticed that bass music music was a great way to promote what he was trying to sell, you know, to sell people on custom audio installs.

So that's how he's looking at it.

He's looking at it as software for his hardware.

Soon enough, the speakers and the music started being sold together.

I know that Nightmare and Bass Street album was sold primarily through these install shops.

It came with a cover warning.

The price does not include new woofer.

You know, so back then the parental advisory sticker was really big.

The car audio bass people started riffing on that.

It's a playful way of sending a real message, which is like, you can destroy your speakers.

We should not turn the bass all the way up unless you're able to properly receive the music.

If you don't, you're going to actually have catastrophic financial consequences.

For the boom car crowd, if you could afford a top-of-the-line sound system, the place to show it off was at a special type of car show called a sound-off competition.

That's where Wayne Harris comes in.

Wayne was a Texan electrical engineer who was known for his legendary boom car, the Terminator.

The Terminator is the most famous boom car of all time.

It was a 1960 Cadillac hearse, and the interior and the panel and the front seat was rearranged to look like an airplane cockpit.

Inside the Terminator was the most advanced technology available at the time.

He actually was a pioneer in utilizing a computer inside of cars.

He utilized the Apple II to monitor and activate four 12-inch woofers in a 50-cubic 50-cubic foot enclosure.

You know, the reason why he used a hearse is because there was a lot of open space to fill in, so he could add a lot of speakers.

To fill that space, Wayne installed seven amplifiers and 23 speakers.

He had a navigation system as well.

He had a mobile phone, he had a VCR, and a very early CD player.

In Texas in the early 80s, Wayne started going to so-called sound-off competitions where people would compete to see whose car could get the loudest.

At first, these were small, informal events held in parking lots.

But in 1984, there was an event called Thunder on Wheels.

It was a national call to have people bring their boom cars to Houston, to the Astrodome, which is the most iconic venue at Houston.

And Wayne Harris shows up that year, and he wins.

Wayne's passion for boom cars went beyond just competing.

Over the next decade, he worked for multiple car stereo companies, using his engineering skills to develop louder and more powerful sound systems.

By the 90s, he's the man in this world of boom cars, and he creates this spectator sport version of head-to-head competitions, kind of like boxing matches, but you're just trying to compete for the highest output of bass.

This new spectator sport was called DB drag racing.

as in decibel drag racing.

And in order to have a fair fight, all entrants were given a specific disc of songs to play.

These compilations featured tracks by artists like Bass Mechanic and DJ Laz.

DJ Laz, who's a legendary figure in Miami-bass music for a completely different style.

He's the one that brought Latin music into the bass fold.

And of course, there was DJ Magic Mike's classic, Feel the Bass, aka Speaker Terror Upper.

In the 90s, Mike would often go to these competitions where he got to see the song live up to its name.

I've seen windshields cracked.

I've seen windshields blown out.

I've seen speakers being dismantled just because of the low end and the air pressure.

And the thing is, people aren't mad about it.

They get happy that it happened.

And then they get happy that I was able to see it happen, you know, that it happened in front of me.

And then what they do after that is they say, okay, well, now we got to go back to the drawing board and we got to put something bigger and better in the tar that can handle this song.

For artists like Mike, these competitions were the ultimate showcase for the power of their music.

But for the DB Drag Racing Association, licensing these official compilation albums was starting to get expensive.

So it's not too long before they realize that they actually don't need this music.

They could just create a CD with just a test sound.

Doesn't need any other aspect of music.

It's just a sine wave.

It just creates that wave that lets you know how strong the bass level is.

And that's how it's been ever since.

Suddenly, these competitions that had formed around this hyper-specific genre of music didn't actually include that music.

So now the sound of competitions, which still exists, there's not really a musical element to it.

So, the people that are coming, they're not in these cars that are in the competitions now because the bass levels are so high.

If you were in the car, it would basically cause your eyes to bulge out.

So, they're controlling the output through a remote control.

And the cars aren't being driven to the competitions when they have them.

They're being put onto truck beds, and they're purely a demonstration tool.

By the late 90s, interest in car audio bass music was waning.

Around that time, DJ magic mike recorded some tracks with fellow bass artist techmaster peb

we did our two albums together we did back in bass and gods of bass i was glad that we got those albums in when we did because the genre was dying a rapid death at that point

It got to a point that people would just buy anything that had the word bass in it or a subwoofer or a girl with a car on it.

And then you had some labels that was just flooding the market with stuff that just wasn't good.

And people got tired of it.

And then people stopped buying it.

After more than a decade of popularity, the car audio base scene had run its course.

It had gone from the streets of Miami to the cassette shops of the Midwest and ultimately to a CD of sine wave tones in cars with speakers so advanced you couldn't safely sit inside and listen.

But the impact of this subculture still reverberates today.

All forms of music, especially mainstream hip-hop, you know, where you're getting the best mixing engineers using the latest technology, they're always coming up with ways to make the bass clearer.

Bass is always becoming more prominent in music.

That's a lot of the legacy of Miami bass and car audio bass is just creating a desire for music lovers of all forms to want to have that be a part of their music.

Musically, it changed a lot because now everything that you listen to has 808 in it, naturally in hip-hop, but it could be country, it could be RB, and especially dance music.

You just can't have music without some kind of sonic frequency underneath that low end.

You just can't have it.

These days, DJ Magic Mike is still making music.

In fact, he's still making Feel the Bass tracks.

His latest album will include a Feel the Bass 8.

The song hasn't dropped officially yet, but Mike and his wife did live stream it on TikTok.

In the video, the two of them dance together behind Mike's turntable, grinning from ear to ear as that thundering bass moves through them.

For those that don't know, this is Feel the Bass 8.

Yeah,

finally, right?

When he's out and about, Mike still runs into super fans.

I've seen cars that had my Final Frontier CD, the whole album cover painted on the car.

And you look and you're just like, wow, my music had that kind of magnitude on you.

You can't put it into words.

Nowadays, cars come with sound systems that are much more powerful than they were in the 80s.

But installing aftermarket speakers is still quite common.

And if you turn on a top 40 station, you'll hear track after track with booming 808 bass lines.

If you want to feel the bass, just crank up the volume.

But be careful out there.

You don't want to get a citation for disturbing the peace.

You know, if someone gets pulled over listening to this 20,000 Hertz episode, I want to know about it.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Send us a voice memo.

What laws did you break listening to 20,000 hertz?

20,000 hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of DeFacto Sound.

Hear more at de facto sound.com.

This episode was written and produced by Marissa Flaxbart and Casey Emmerling.

With help from Grace East.

It was sound design and mixed by Jade Dickey, Colin DeVarney, and Justin Hollis.

Thanks to our guests, Jesse Serwer and DJ Magic Mike, and thanks to Rob Williams for helping connect us with Mike.

Finally, thanks to everyone who sent in messages about their bass tape memories, including Chris, Dave, Drake, Straker, and two different Ryans.

I'm Dallas Taylor.

Thanks for listening.