On a muggy August evening on Randalls Island, I stood in a field of Honda Odysseys and CR-Vs, tricked out with towering rows of tweeters and subwoofers. Speakers were affixed to the roofs or lined the trunks of the vehicles like light artillery, painted in canary yellows, blood reds and indigo blues.
This is Dominican car audio culture, notorious in New York. It is often parodied on TikTok, capturing the tragicomedy of living in this city. “Me trying to fall asleep in NYC,” a caption will typically read, as pounding bass bludgeons an unsuspecting sleeper out of bed.
If you live in certain parts of New York, this is all too familiar. It is the sound of bachata, dembow and merengue típico infiltrating every city crevice on the weekends until the cops try to shut the music down, and an after-hours game of cat and mouse commences. It is a secret world of pleasure and protest, made blaringly public.
My guides that night were Carlos Cruz, the head of Team Viruz, and his wife, Karina. They wore matching jerseys, emblazoned in neon green text and biohazard signs, their nicknames inscribed on the back: “Virus” and “La Bambina.”
Carlos is a musicólogo; enthusiasts like him own cars with customized sound systems, and at meets and shows, they are like D.J.s and live engineers, selecting songs and mixing levels for maximum effect. Some prefer clean sound: high-quality audio that allows them to hear the texture of drum kicks and the metal scrapes of the güira in merengue típico. Others simply go for volume, the kind that suffocates their challengers and makes your eyeballs vibrate out of their sockets.
“If you don’t feel like it’s strangling you, then it’s no good,” Carlos said with a chuckle.
On the drive to Randalls Island from the Bronx, Carlos, 57, and Karina, 44, decoded musicólogo terminology for me. There are instaladores, those who install equipment and auxiliary batteries in cars, which are known as builds or projects. Instaladores often own their own body shops, which are also home to sound teams, the groups that gather at informal meet-ups in parking lots or participate in judged competitions across the country, chasing trophies and bragging rights. Karina explained that people curate USB drives packed with MP3s; others design and construct wooden speaker enclosures. The process can take up to five months.
The crews at Randalls Island have spent tens of thousands of dollars customizing their projects. And while New York remains a stronghold for the culture, the community has expanded outside of the five boroughs and across the East Coast.
Josue Manzueta of Team La Movie is newer to the scene. Coming off his day job at a T-Mobile store in Long Island, he rolled up to a parking lot near Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, arriving in an otherwise unassuming white 2020 Honda Accord Sport. He set up his radio and a small chuchero, a cabinet with speakers, tweeters and sometimes a horn, and swiftly assembled it on top of the car, rearranging the vehicle and its contents like a Transformer. His sedan has a custom license plate that reads, in all caps, “Q DULCE,” or “HOW SWEET.”
Manzueta, 20, was introduced to car sound system culture by his father. “Back in the Dominican Republic, he had a huge minivan filled with 10 speakers and 18 bass,” he explained. His parents eventually immigrated to the United States, where Manzueta was born. “He took me to an event exactly where we are right now, like six years ago. And I fell in love,” Manzueta said.
Team La Movie is still growing, so its members mostly convene for casual weekend hangouts. “I don’t compete that much,” Manzueta said. “But if anybody comes and tries to put their music over mine, I’ma turn my [expletive] up!” he cackled. “‘Yo, your music is wack!’” he pantomimes, grinning from ear to ear. “I just love trash talking.”
Musicólogos who have larger builds typically meet during the day at car shows, where they have permits and are safe from the police. But those with smaller projects congregate after hours, informally, when team members are off work.
Musicólogos and the police are almost always at odds. “Either the cops come right away or they’re already here waiting for us,” said Eddie Peña, a 21-year-old part-time instalador who runs Team La Movie’s Instagram, pointing to a police van in the distance, its sirens already flashing.
Sometimes, the cops will pounce when the music starts and order teams to turn it off. If matters escalate, confiscation is common, and it is a musicólogo’s worst nightmare, especially if you’ve invested thousands to customize your car. If the police can’t easily remove the speakers, they’ll take the whole vehicle, and issue a court summons that could lead to fines. Peña said that musicólogos may have to wait months to retrieve their vehicle from the pound — and if they don’t have the car title, it will end up at a police auction.
“I feel like most of us get really misconstrued [as] being criminals,” Manzueta said. “And we’re not. Most of us have 9-to-5 jobs. We have an honest living.”
This is a culture born out of a love for sound, for community — a cradle of belonging in a country that is difficult to call yours. It is an echo of the din that saturates life in the Dominican Republic, the kind that occupies street corners, homes and colmados. An inherited sonic dissent, passed down through experiences of migration.
“I just love listening to loud music. I love people watching,” Manzueta said. “And there’s definitely a source of pride there.” One of his favorite genres to play is típico, a traditional Dominican style of merengue. “I love representing my country.”
On a cloudy afternoon in late August, at his body shop in Island Park on Long Island, Adrian Abreu Bonifacio was wiping sleep from his eyes. The garage was a mess. Plastic buckets of nails dotted the floor. The back porch overflowed with skeletons of speaker cabinets and spare planks of wood. Bonifacio had spent the last two days working around the clock with a client who drove all the way from Texas to build out his system from scratch at Abreu Bonifacio’s shop.
Abreu Bonifacio’s crown jewel is La Perra Blanca (“The White Dog”), a minivan he designed and built for a customer earlier this year. It boasts candy apple leather interiors, and an arsenal of matching red and white subwoofers and tweeters sits on its roof, adjustable by remote control. Inside, there are four 21-inch subwoofers. “We’re the first people to debut this kind of project,” he said, positively beaming.
Abreu Bonifacio, 36, may be sought after today, but he was once just a child growing up in the Dominican Republic who toyed with car radios. “My father fixed cars,” he explained. “People’s cars would break down, and they’d bring them to our house. I’d take the radios; I’d take out the speakers.” By the time he was 9, he knew how to install a radio. And he was 13 years old when he finished his first customization: a pasola, the Dominican word for a motor scooter.
Today, Abreu Bonifacio is a full-time instalador. “When I started, I just loved doing it, but I didn’t know where to get the resources,” he said. His wife, Carolina, who was standing in the office of his body shop, giggled, remembering that when he didn’t have the proper hardware, he’d ruin their silverware, using knives and forks as makeshift tools.
He said that this scene has expanded so much, it’s become like a sport, as competitive as baseball or soccer. And even though car audio culture is popular across different Afro-Caribbean and Latin American diasporic communities, in the tristate area, it is Dominicans who outshine the rest. “It’s very rare to see someone with a project of magnitude who isn’t Dominican,” he said. “Everyone has their own style. But bass and vocals that sound that strong — only we use it.”
“Dominicans, in this country, we cause a desorden,” he grinned.
A desorden is an uproar, a disturbance, a commotion. On the last weekend of August, another desorden was scheduled. But it was not a quotidian desorden. It was a specific kind of throbbing, vibrating euphoria: a car show at the Wall Stadium Speedway in Wall Township, N.J.
Vans painted in neon magentas and pastel pinks assembled in huge circles, the speakers on their roofs locked in embrace, and swarms of spectators gathered inside the rings. Car windshields, T-shirts and caps were adorned with team and project names written in capital letters: “LA ABUSADORA” and “TEAM BELLO” and “LA SUPER RABIOSA.”
And of course, there was the music. The bass pulsated through the air, expanding and contracting like heart palpitations. In each crowd, musicólogos blasted songs over their rivals across the circle, hoping to drown them out.
In the roar of the desorden, adversaries stood opposite each other on car roofs, looming high above the people. Their fingers curled into the shape of mouths to mock their opponents’ trash talk. They drew them across necks, simulating a slit throat. Another wrote a message on his cellphone in all-caps and paraded it around: “NO SON DE NA’.” Roughly, “YOU AIN’T NOTHING.”
Like Manzueta’s, this trash talk was harmless. Instead, a sense of intimacy hovered in the air — the kind of intimacy that grounds diasporic Caribbean life. Here, you could feel the comfort and kinship that lives in noise, in the solace of overtalk. It was a free-flowing idyll, one that refused smallness and silence.
Source: Music - nytimes.com
