You drive your car to an intersection and stop at a red light. Your rearview mirror starts to shake, and you look blurry in its reflection. It must be an earth quake.

In the parking lot of your local mall, you cruise at a low speed and you feel it again. You hear it. It�s an apocalypse of noise. Must be a riot.

With your eyes, not mirrors, you look to your left and a car with its windows rolled to the floor is blurred. This isn�t an earthquake in the typical sense. It�s a sound-quake. And it�s coming from millions of cars around the world.

I�ve never been a part of the highly evolved �advancements� in car stereo systems in which I was raised. I remembering seeing Cadillac�s and low rider trucks in music videos and on the streets, the ones with their windows rolled low, flooding the streets with �music.� I also remember thinking how these people weren�t too concerned with the music; rather they were concerned with bass, concerned with treble. Concerned if their rearview and side mirrors were on the verge of cracking. I also remember thinking this is just one more step towards the decay of music.

I�ve always had a passion in the quality of music, not its volume. There is a certain line to be drawn between a good sounding stereo and just plain noise. And there is also a line to be drawn between the intentions of the stereo owner. For these people with �kicking 15�s� and �subs,� it�s safe to say it�s not about music, it�s about reaction. It�s about attention. It�s about superiority.

The evolution of stereos, you would think, is an attempt to enhance the music�s clarity, giving you a better emotional connection with the music. You would feel it in your soul, not the vibrations underneath your bucketed car seat. You would feel it in your heart, not through the rattling loose screws of your trunk. Not from the admiring eyes of your peers.

With all these new sound �advancements,� music has become a mere tool for the advancement of winning rather than an art. Check the papers. Go to a car stereo show. Listen to the decibel competitions. The bass competitions. I dare you to find a melody. They won�t be bumpin� Beethoven�s 5th. They won�t be blazin� Reich�s �City Life.�

And with all these �advancements,� it�s becoming easier and easier to make bad music sound �good.� In the recording industry, we are able to quantize off beat drummers in a matter of seconds. We are able to hide a bad vocalist with a good look behind high level bass tracks and backing vocalists. There is no talent involved, no passion. A good record should be able to be played on any stereo with success, but no one shoots for that anymore, and we have amplifiers and subwoofers to thank. �Artists� now days rely on the quality of sound, the advanced technology of their fans, not the quality of their music. And this is just another example of the ways that technology promotes laziness, a major concern Neil Postman displays in his book Technopoly.

Some of the greatest bands of all-time, for example, The Beatles, recorded every album to vinyl. You can feel their music in the deep groves of the record, from the low quality needle. If you listen to an enhanced, re-mastered, transferred to CD Beatles album on a high-tech sound system, the experience is not the same, nor as real. Another example: The greatest jazz albums ever made were recorded live and mostly released on vinyl. People like Miles Davis and John Coltrane did not need the enhancement of 15 inch subwoofers.

In Technopoly, Postman states, �To every Old World belief, habit, or tradition there was, and still is a technological alternative. To prayer, the alternative is penicillin; to family roots, the alternative is mobility; to reading, the alternative is television�� I argue to music, the alternative, as Palahniuk said, is winning. The alternative is competition. The alternative is attention. It�s not about music anymore, it�s about advancement. It�s about progress. It�s intimidation. About perfection. Effect. Reaction.

Postman states, �To a man with a pencil, everything looks like a list. To a man with a camera, everything looks like an image.� I argue, to a man with subwoofers, everything sounds like bass. To a man with no voice, everything needs to be loud.

People, with these massive bass speakers and amplifiers, they run to the record store and buy their �Booty Bass� or �Thump Music�, these CD�s, with a half naked girl on the cover, accentuating the low-rider she�s laying on, accentuating the enormous cartoon speakers generated in the backround. Printed on the cover is this: �It'll heat up your subwoofers' voice coils, blow your amplifiers fuses and shake the mirror off your windshield.� This is less music and more a �get-cool-quick� scheme. Less about composition and more of a cry for help.

If music had a face, it�d be black, blue, and molested.

If talent had a voice, it�d be lost somewhere between Broadway and 21st.

But what�s most important to notice about our culture, with our loud car stereos and noise pollution, is that all we are really doing is begging for a voice, begging to be heard. Instead of finding it within ourselves, we find it through noise. We find it through treble, through bass. Through thunderous curse words that smash from our speakers. If you won�t listen, I�ll make you listen. You will hear my voice. You will acknowledge my existence. It�s a pollution of technology, not of noise, and we are all drowning. More and more, it�s becoming harder to be heard through intellectual thought. And who wants to spend time improving their mind when it�s so much easier to be heard through noise. Through volume. Postman states, �These are the sounds of culture in pain�� He is talking about us, our culture, America, the only culture to become a Technopoly, a culture losing touch with divinity and replacing it with technology. And each turn of the knob is a cry to God. Each increased decibel is a prayer to above.

Listen to us, we are in pain.

We aren�t winning, we�re losing.

We will blow fuses and eardrums for attention.

We will shatter windows just to be heard.

We will scream until you listen.

We want you back.