Ben Koppl, better known as @rollersurfer, is not a big name pro, but he has more followers on Instagram than a lot of them. He is what you would refer to as an influencer, though he really hates being called that, and is not hawking any off-brand energy teas on his account. In fact, he barely writes captions, eschews most mainstream sponsorship (he gets stuff from Bones and Vans, but his board sponsor is a very sick, very small company from South London called Blast), and generally prefers to let his skating speak for itself. It certainly has a lot to say.Trying to assign it to a genre is kind of a futile exercise — Jenkem had to create a compound word, “goof-gnar,” to do it — but suffice to say it’s a whole lot of batty transition shit, breaking of unwritten rules, seemingly endless combos, crazy junk jam configurations, and eclectic street spots, with the occasional flatground frontside flip thrown in for good measure. As expected, the mind that produces that delicious skate soup is a pretty lively one. He lives in Seattle and, after one too many meandering philosophical conversations about skateboarding at our local meet-up spot, I convinced him that we should try to do an interview. This is a very shitty interview — I forgot to ask him who his sponsors are, or really anything about what his actual goals within skateboarding are — but it does contain a lot of his very well-formed opinions about how the internet has changed skateboarding, how every trick you want to do has already been done, and what kind of skateboarding people actually want to see online. So that’s something?
Interview by Tobias Coughlin-Bogue
Photo Courtesy of Ben Koppl
What’s your name and what do you do?
My name is Ben and I’m a third grade special ed teacher.
I meant in skateboarding.
Oh yeah, I skate.
Yes you do. But you also have 92,000 followers on Instagram, which is kind of a big deal nowadays. What role has Instagram played in your life and your skateboarding?
So, I feel like rather than being an early-comer to the Instagram phase, I was a latecomer to the YouTube era. And there was a golden era of YouTube I would say around 2009 to 2012-2013, which corresponded with me being in college. There was the rise of things like Welcome Skateboards, which I regard as the first social media skateboard company, where it didn’t come from making big videos or being in magazines, it existed because of YouTube videos. And was very person to person and very authentic in that era. That played a huge role in me even moving to Seattle. I wanted to do shit like that, and it didn’t really work out because I didn’t know anyone. I had skated a lot in California before I moved up here, but I had achieved no renown for that period.
You were just skating?
I was flow for Osiris.
Sick!
And they gave me the worst shoes.
Wait, what shoes of theirs weren’t the worst shoes?
The worst shoes were the Osiris Bronx, which were a pleather high top.
I can actually see you wearing those nowadays.
[visibly annoyed] Suuuure.
Basically, long story short, you were interested in doing more with skateboarding, but it wasn’t really happening. And then at some point you moved to Japan to teach English and…?
Well I’d fully given up on doing anything with skateboarding in a sponsorship type of sense. I just wanted to be in YouTube videos I guess, which is a stupid thing to say, and pretty transparent I suppose.
For the era, that’s a pretty normal thing to want. That’s kind of when “edits” started to become a thing.
It was a thing. I didn’t get a smartphone until I graduated from college. I was a really focused student. And that was what I was doing, I was going to college and I was skating all the fucking time. But I was just skating around. I skated cruiser wheels for four consecutive years, one set of 90A Powell Peralta regular old throwback wheels. And I didn’t really know that many skaters. I skated around Capitol Hill a ton, but mostly by myself or with a small handful of people. I met people through Cal Anderson, but it wasn’t really happening. Then I moved to Japan basically just because I liked the Far East Skate Network videos. I really thought that that type of skating was something that spoke to me. Growing up in a small town where there weren’t a lot of spots, it was cool to see someone else taking “not-spot” skating really far.
Not-spot skating! Would you describe yourself as a not-spot skater?
I don’t even make it to the spot. Like if people are taking me to the spot…
You find some weird shit along the way?
I skate four things on the way, then get to the spot and I’m tired. And then end up skating the bottom stair of whatever I was supposed to jump down. Which is good and bad for filmers, I’m sure. I do produce a lot of footage that way.
Which also is a kind of unique demand of the internet skate economy – constant posting.
Well that’s something that I feel like, for better or worse, what I do is really conducive to. I feel like a medium came around that really showcases what I do in particular.
And you were kind of just doing it in obscurity before Instagram hit?
Yeah, I mean if you go back to the very first thing I ever posted on it, or my early YouTube videos from when I was like 12, I’ve always kind of skated like this. And I mean, some of my first videos were like The Search for Animal Chin and Rodney Mullen vs. Daewon Song Round 2, both of which are extremely ridiculous videos.
That explains a lot!
If you just combined those, I might never have changed at all. So there’s a nugget for you. And then I had some Logic videos, which were pretty sick. And then all the Girl videos, and then I got really into, like, mainstream skating. But I always had a soft spot for the end credits, when there would be like three silly tricks. And Black Label videos.
With Jason Adams doing slappies and shit like that?
Yeah, or like, there’s a specific John Lucero part, which is in the after credits to Label Kills. I broke that VHS. I rewound it so many times it stopped working. The tape split. It’s a great video. Also, because my dad sells antiques for a living, I always had old Thrashers, old skateboards, and old magazines. And I sort of thought it was contemporary more than maybe it was at the time.
Because you were getting the very limited scope of what was in the antique shop?
Yeah, I mean, this was before YouTube or social media existed, when I started skateboarding in 2001. So I knew about the Red Dragons, because I went to Canada one time.
[laughing] Amazing.
And I knew about the Storm tour. Osiris’ The Storm.
Have you seen Skateboard Party?
Yeah, the kickflip over the thing into the pool is pretty sick.
What about the part where Jason Ellis eats the still-beating shark heart?
“Shark’s heart…”
“…I ate the heart of a shark!” Maybe one of the best b-roll clips ever to appear in a skate video.
Yeah, pretty iconic. But I saw a lot of old VHS videos from that era. I just thought it all was kind of simultaneous, and I think in that sense, my skating’s always been anachronistic. That’s the word I like. It’s trying to be this past thing, but I didn’t know it wasn’t also connected to the future.
Again, the current wave of “let’s go dig up all these old weird tricks,” it kind of seems like…
But I honestly think that a lot of people think they’re inventing the wheel with those. I don’t think people are aware that Dan Peterka did that in 1993 in whatever video. And most people haven’t heard of like Acme Skateboards or Union Wheels or even like Blockhead or H-Street.
A lot of those ledge tricks, even like the contemporary, flip-in-flip-out shit…
It’s not tech, compared to what was tech back then.
Maybe it wasn’t on as tall of a ledge, but it’s all been done.
That was the era when quality didn’t matter, and it was really similar to Instagram in the sense that it went from an era where you primarily had people filming things on really expensive film stock–which I would make analogous to VX1000 footage in the modern day–to where you suddenly had new formats coming out where you could film a thousand tries. That’s when all the ads became sequences that were frame grabs. And the tricks just went haywire!
Because you could sit there for three hours trying to do the most bizarre shit?
Way more than three hours. You could stay there for days and just burn footage and it wasn’t expensive. And we’ve seen everything go digital in the modern era, and it’s kind of the same thing. The tricks became more integral to the skateboarding than whether or not you could ever actually do them. That’s why I try to do a lot of lines, because I think lines communicate something of the functionality of tricks. I don’t like doing stuff that I could only ever do one time.
There’s a lot more composition to lines, of course. You can express yourself via trick selection a lot more.
There’s structure to it, and I like that.
But consistency really matters, is what you’re saying. I definitely agree.
It should matter, and social media doesn’t really translate that. There are a lot of dudes you see and you just know, like…their push looks really cumbersome. Or when they kickturn between two features, you just wonder if they know how to not tic tac all the time. I’m not calling out anyone in particular, but you do see stuff where you’re like, “Wow, you are really good at tricks for how not good you are at riding this thing.”
How uncomfortable you might look on a board.
That’s a huge difference too, between now and when I started skateboarding. Skateboards were a mode of transportation first. And it started in your driveway. No one dropped you off at the skatepark, you maybe pushed to it if you were down to push a few miles.
Yeah, and because of that you ended up at this point, like the way I feel now, where it’s more comfortable to go down the street on my skateboard than to walk. And you look relaxed on your board because you’re on it all the time.
Isn’t that the point?
But now you really can drive to the skatepark and it’s like a gym. It’s like, “I’m driving to the gym and I have my gym bag, I’m going to get into my track pants and put on my skate shoes and do tricks for 45 minutes, then I’m going to go home and catch the next episode of Game of Thrones.” You really do have more people who are focused on getting their two hours in or whatever, than people who are going out into the city and bringing their skateboard and going to school or work and then just skating around afterwards.
I think that just changes the demographics that make up the basis of all skateboarders, where you primarily have skateboarders who come from homes where their parents would drive them to a sporting environment. Probably a chiller parent, but nevertheless, that wasn’t always realistic. When I started skateboarding, it was just the kids who had nothing to do, or wanted to avoid their front yard.
It sounds like what we’re kind of coming to is that skateboarding is getting washed out, because of the insane volume of insanely gnarly tricks. You’re somebody who has a ton of followers on Instagram. People are obviously interested in the tricks you’re doing and the way you’re doing them. What separates that from many other people who are doing, I guess I would say, similar stuff? There’s got to be some secret sauce to Instagram success. Like, even when we think about other Instagram stars, who maybe skate more conventionally, like @burberry.erry and @versace_plug, there’s something about the way they do their conventional tricks that’s more appealing than the five million other people out there who are good.
To me, that just reflects how much Instagram is about showcasing a persona than it is about projecting good skateboard footage into the world. And I think that’s why people are consuming it more than they consume even traditional skate media, like DVDs or magazines. I think the best skateboarding has always allowed you to tap into a person, and understand what they’re like from how they use the skateboard. If there was ever an argument that skateboarding is an art, it would be that. Although I would not like to get into that debate right now! I don’t care about it, and it’s not relevant or important. It’s semantic. But…Instagram prioritizes people who are big personalities, who have something new to contribute to the conversation, and if you have nothing to say, that voice doesn’t really matter. If you’re really good but you have no new idea, or you don’t bring substance to the table, I don’t think that has a long shelf life. I don’t think that people genuinely care about the hardest tricks as much as they think they do. There are definitely people I could name who are walking illustrations of the fact that being an amazing skateboarder does not necessarily get that much attention. The fact that you’re a good skateboarder might reflect the fact that you’re an incredibly boring person who will just practice something a million times, but not someone who I would ever want to see or hang out with or be around.
There is this weird aspect of wanting to believe that the person you’re watching is cool and fun. That’s like that whole “don’t meet your heroes” thing. Like the pros come to town on tour and you meet that guy who you’ve loved their skateboarding and they turn out to be a dick. And that was in the era of physical videos, where you mostly just saw their tricks. Now you see what they’re having for lunch on their story, and it’s like you can get almost a hyper-realistic sense of who they are as a person.
But…
It’s also curated.
Yeah and back in the day you had legend and myth within skateboarding. Now you have the skateboarder themselves as the communicator of their own narrative. I think there’s definitely a problem with that. That’s why I don’t write lengthy captions or really post text. I don’t think people have any idea what I do for work generally speaking. I don’t think they really care and I don’t think that people generally want to connect with what I do on that level. I think that the traveling that I do is really interesting to people, and the personalities I come across are really interesting.
But they can see that in the footage.
They can see that in the footage, and that’s what they’re basically there for. Some new ideas and a sense of, like, fun skateboarding that they can watch and maybe go imitate later in whatever way. I think that’s like — if I were to say anything really corny in this whole interview, it’s that it’s cool to me when people go out and try something that is like something I would do but it’s something I’ve never thought of and I’ve never seen. It’s like, Alright cool, I feel like I communicated a pretty thorough idea, if that’s what came back.
I’ve definitely found myself much more inclined to make weird, janky combinations at the tennis courts, just from watching your clips.
I’m touched. I’m very touched. It’s definitely more fun than skating the same shit all the time.
