Eugene Mullins



Boy oh boy, I tell you, I’ve had just about enough of all this noise. That same infernal racket every night, with the boom-boom-boom and the bam-bam-bam. I don’t get upset by much, but this has got to stop. I’ve had it up to here with these punks driving down my street blasting their late-’90s, ghettotech, DJ Godfather–inflected hip-hop.


I swear, if I hear one more gritty, blazing-fast Detroit beat from the rolled-down windows of a passing car, I’m going to lose it.

This is a residential community, for crying out loud, not an East Side jit party with Starski and Clutch holding court on the turntables. The noise they make is unbelievable! You can hear them coming from a mile away with their up-tempo rhythms that meld sounds as diverse as electro-funk, techno, and house. Do they not realize there are families living here?


I don’t ask for a lot. Just a little peace and quiet as I enjoy a crossword or read a few pages of a book before bed. You’d think after working 40 years and raising a family, I’d deserve one single night now and then without some riffraff gunning it down my block with a tricked-out stereo blaring Bitch Ass Darius B-sides or classic tracks off Disco D’s genre-epitomizing album Straight Out Tha Trunk.

Some of us have to be at work in the morning, for God’s sake!

My wife tells me not to get so riled up about it. She says kids will be kids and listen to their raw double-time hip-hop beats with pitched-up vocal tags, and she says maybe these young people don’t even realize how much of an irritation they’re being. Oh, they know it, all right. No one needs to pop their sunroof and play Erotek’s 1999 club banger “I Shall Tek Thee” that freaking loud. No one.


Besides, I’m long past the point of trying to ignore these troublemakers. Most nights, the second I hear DJ Assault’s distinctive pulsating groove followed by the lyrics “In the club / And on the street / I keep bangin’ / I keep bangin’ the beat,” I’m out on my porch yelling at them at the top of my lungs to turn down their goddamn fusions of juke, hyphy, and Miami bass.

And it’s around the clock with this stuff! Ten p.m., 11 p.m., 3 a.m.—it’s all fair game to these idiots. People are trying to sleep, you know! Not have their bedroom windows rattled by the sound of a quintessential Motor City genre that began in the 1970s as the musical tastes of local teenagers collided on the airwaves and in the dance clubs around Jefferson Avenue, combining elements of traditional hip-hop and funk with the sophistication of the European discothèque scene in ways that went on to influence not only East Coast, West Coast, and Southern rap, but arguably the entire EDM resurgence of the mid- to late aughts. Talk about a nuisance.


On and on they go every night with that same repetitive TR-808–driven nonsense! What am I supposed to do, just sit here and take this regional electronic music subgenre inspired by legendary Detroit radio DJ the Electrifying Mojo? No siree, not me.

The next time it happens, I’m calling the cops. I mean it. No one cruises through my neighborhood cranking deep cuts from the Booty Bar Records back catalog at such an ungodly volume. If you want to pollute your ears with endlessly looping screwed-and-chopped vocals, multilayered Euro-synthpop samples, and complicated record-scratching techniques, so be it. But do it at a reasonable level so you don’t set my dog to yapping at all hours of the night.


Or if that’s too much to ask, at least have the common decency to bump some good old-fashioned Wreckx-n-Effect instead.