Question: Which Is More Gloriously Extreme, Houston SLABs or Bosozoku Style?
In recent years, there was no way any car customizer in the world was going to come close to the absurd lengths that practitioners of Bōsōzoku Style in Japan went to when modifying their vehicles. Six exhaust pipes sticking ten feet straight up out of a slammed Corona with an octo-wing? Not enough! That’s a shame for patriotic Americans, because we once ruled the world when it came to brain-scrambling, utterly senseless customized vehicles. But wait! The love of 84s and old-timey lowrider-style kandy paint in Houston has led to a renaissance, and the SLAB (Slow, Loud, And Bangin’) may be knocking the Bōsōzoku Style machines off their pedestal.
A SLAB is typically (though not always) a GM luxury sedan, and it boasts wheels with way more “poke” than anything Cragar ever imagined for the ’84 Eldorado (the aftermarket has stepped in with 30-spoke “elbows” that stick out 18″ or more), kandy paint, neon, 10-billion-watt sound systems, and so on. The green Cadillac at 0:13 in the video above may well be The Greatest Car of All Time. Take that, Japan! As Mike Jones says in his SLAB anthem, “tippin’ on four ‘bows, wrapped in four Vogues.”
But then… check out what’s going on over there!
Yeah, put on some Melt-Banana, add another 20 exhaust pipes, and maybe the SLABs have another couple of years before they can match Bōsōzoku Style. What do you say?
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
More by Murilee Martin
Comments
Join the conversation
I THINK that the first car featured in the Bosozoku video is a replica of the car from the Japanese manga series 'Shakotan Boogie', it was the pink and white 2 door Toyota Chaser. That being said however, not my thing! Yes, all the cars were goofy and silly looking and I'm really trying to be nice about it, though I did like the clean silver 'Ken and Mary' 4 door Skyline that shows up in the middle of the video. Then again I'm a raving Skyline fanatic. I also brought up 'Shakotan Boogie' because the same author later produced a different manga called 'Wangan Midnight' that was radically different from the Bosozoku scene, Wangan was about high speed racing on the Tokyo Bayshore Expressway. The main car from that one was a '70s era Nissan Fairlady Z/Datsun 240Z that had 600+ hp and could exceed 200 MPH.
Some Bosozoku cars are awesome. When taken to the extreme seen in the picture shown...it becomes horrendous. But entertaining no less. Some great rims on those cars too...