GHETTO BLASTER

noun (Lifestyle and Leisure) (Music) In slang, a large, portable stereo radio (sometimes incorporating a cassette player), especially one on which popular music is played loudly in the street. (Considered by some to be racially offensive.) Etymology: Formed by compounding. The music supposedly blasts the neighbourhood with its exaggerated volume; this is associated mostly with Black and ethnic-minority areas, which explains the reference to the ghetto. History and Usage: The term originated in the US in about 1980, and was perhaps the most graphic of all the slang names for these outsize portable stereos which, it seems, can only be played at full volume. Other names for the same thing included (in the US) beat box, boom box, and the mixed ghetto box; minority briefcase and (in the UK) Brixton briefcase alluded to their having become part of the expected street uniform of hip hop and its followers. Despite its rather racialist connotations, ghetto blaster proved humorous enough to spread round the world to nearly every English-speaking country where hip hop and break-dancing became popular: groups of youngsters gathering in the street for break-dancing needed a ghetto blaster to provide the accompanying beat. A White American rhythm-and-blues sextet from the Deep South even called themselves The Ghetto Blasters in the early eighties. A back-formed verb ghetto-blast has also developed, with an action noun ghetto-blasting and an adjective ghetto-blasted to go along with it. Brisbane's breakdancers...attracted a bigger crowd than the officially-approved buskers; but retribution wasn't long in following. The police came down, the ghetto blasters were turned off and the kids left. Sunday Mail (Brisbane) 25 May 1986, p. 3 Waterproof Sports models have helped restore silence to ghetto-blasted beaches. Q Oct. 1987, p. 69