I wake up in the morning and I hear, BOOM BOOM BOOM.

I am sitting in class trying to pay attention to the lecture when all of a sudden I hear, BOOM BOOM BOOM.

Miriam Welderufael

I am lying down in bed and then again I hear, BOOM BOOM BOOM.

No, that sound is not my heart and it’s not a bomb. It is the ridiculously loud bass coming from the back of someone’s car coming down the drive onto the campus.

Students as well as non-students are not being respectful to the campus and the people on the campus when they come down the drive blaring their car stereos at a deafening volume.

There are people ACTUALLY here to get an education and who do not want Club 54 on wheels passing through at all hours of the day and night.

It is extremely distracting when you are trying to study or sleep and it sounds like there is someone drumming on your desk and screaming at the top of their lungs.

It is hard for me to understand why anyone would want music that loud at all, let alone at school. I guess they are trying to look cool, but they don’t.

I once heard an old man say, "It seems nowadays all the young people gone deaf."

I couldn’t agree more. The music coming out these cars seems louder than the music that I hear at the club. Why does the music need to be so loud?

If hearing the music while I am in class and studying is not bad enough, I have ACTUALLY been awakened in the middle of the night on numerous occasions because of these earsplitting radios coming down the drive.

UVI is not just a school to me and many other students, but it is a place of work and the place where many of us sleep at night. People coming up and down the drive with loud music ACTUALLY is disrespectful to us.

To make matters even worse, most of the words being launched out of these cars are incredibly vulgar. The volume is not the only thing offensive about these people imposing their "music" on us, but the content of what we are being forced to listen to is provocative and inappropriate for a school setting.

If your idea of music is a combination of curse words, aggressive language and all sorts of sexual implications, that’s fine, but please stop disrupting those of us who are ACTUALLY here trying to further our education with any music and especially not with that music.

Miriam Welderufael writes for The UVI Voice, the University of the Virgin Islands student newspaper, which originally published this article.

Articles in the Voices section represent the views of the individual writers and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Black College Wire.

Posted Apr. 20, 2008