It’s 2019 and, after a short break to skate places I normally would get kicked out of while everyone is busy celebrating an ancient baby, I am back on my bullshit. While that bullshit normally involves pointing out the sad myopia of cishet skate bros, sometimes it’s more general. Sometimes it’s just about skateboarding.
Words: Tobias Coughlin-Bogue
This time, it’s about how goddamn thirsty skateboarding is getting. Against my better judgment, I rung in the new year by reinstalling Instagram on my phone and—of fucking course—I stumbled upon this humdinger:
This is not the nadir when it comes to product endorsement, of course—my vote would go to Chris Cole’s McRib ad, or perhaps his exhortation that you “make sure that you’re rolling tight” with two brand new pairs of boxers from Stance every month—but Biebel’s video is startlingly representative of our current era. Skateboarders are more obsessed than ever with getting rich, more willing to accept any endorsement from any company. I don’t begrudge Neen Williams his newly healthy lifestyle, but did he need to monetize it via Whole Foods? Given the pretty penny he probably made when Saint Archer sold to MillerCoors, did Mikey Taylor really need to go start a real estate development company that specifically looks to profit off of projects in “up and coming” communities?
I take everything I said about Marc Johnson back. Every old pro should start their own skateboard brand and spend all day yelling at teens on social media so that none of them try to come up with other ideas in the real world holy shit. pic.twitter.com/8FiPo6CZyd
— Zach Harris (@10000youtubes) November 9, 2018
Is that really what we’re supposed to want, in 2019? To get rich by sowing displacement in minority communities? To get in our teal Lambo and drive to the Diamond Mine™® to shoot hoops and do fake-stee switch heels with our boy Nick Tershay? To be a fitness influencer? I’m sorry, but all of that can fuck off forever. That’s not what skateboarding is about.
To be fair, skateboarders have always depended on the mechanisms of capitalism for support—the shoe sponsor pays the bills, after all, including ours—but capitalism is the air we all breathe. Skaters sign on the dotted line merely to continue skateboarding for a living, or perhaps to keep their skate shop open for one more year. I’m sure Jim Theibaud makes a decent salary running DLX, but it’s easy to see that he’s taken on the duties of a businessman because he loves skateboarding. Maybe other guys did it to get rich in the past, but not filthy, stinking rich. And no matter how you slice it, this shit stinks:
To me, skateboarding is an antidote to the type of aspirational delusion that causes one man to own three ludicrously expensive sports cars, an increasingly weird flex in a city full of starving people living in tents. My favorite thing about skateboarding is that, in its purest form, it is one of the most unproductive things you can possibly do. It is pointless, as far as society is concerned, and that is the point.
We are, the world over, conditioned from birth to be productive. To get out there, chase success, make something of ourselves, and so on. If we cannot acquire vast wealth of our own, we are kept in thrall to it via the wealth of celebrities, which is thrust into our face at every turn. We are told that our value is measured in units of currency, and we are only taught how to do things that will generate more of it. But skateboarding helps us see the fallacy in all that. It teaches you that benches are not just for eating Qdoba on a 30-minute lunch break, and that there is much, much more to life than what you do for a living. Because it is a relatively affordable, accessible activity, skateboarding brings you into contact with people from all races, creeds, and classes. It brings you to places in your city, your state, or even the world that you would never otherwise go, all in pursuit of spots. In short, it opens up your mind to a lot of experiences and ideas that are dangerous to your future as an economic contributor.
This is why your parents used to be so afraid of it. They want what’s best for you, and given how we’ve organized society, that usually involves making a lot of money. But nowadays, parents don’t always see skateboarding as a vow of poverty, they see a future of Olympic gold, or millions of Instagram followers. But being good enough to captivate 2.7 million people isn’t what makes skateboarding fun. Sorry, but the last time Nyjah looked like he was having fun did not involve a skateboard.
What makes skateboarding fun is that when you’re doing it, if you’re doing it right, you aren’t thinking about how cool it’s going to look on the ‘gram or how totally sponced you’re going to get for it. You’re not thinking about follower counts and cars and nutrition supplements, because your mind is far too busy trying to figure out how something as unlikely as a 360 flip is supposed to work. Spending that much mental energy on something that you and perhaps the five other people in the parking garage with you will witness is infinitely impractical. It is a waste of time. But in a society where time is money and cash rules everything around us, wasting time is often our only true freedom. To be truly free, if only for an hour or so, is worth more than any endorsement deal that has ever existed.
The great loafer Henry Miller once closed a letter to a friend by exhorting him to “do as little as possible.” Miller was a madly, neurotically active writer, thinker, gastronome, and fornicator, so he wasn’t suggesting that his friend actually do nothing. What he hoped for his friend was to do less remunerative work. To rid his mind of our modern obsession with making it big, and instead make just enough to live. And that is what I hope for you as we begin 2019.
I realize it takes more time than ever just to scrape by, which leaves precious little to go skate, but I hope you can find a few hours every week to get on your skateboard and think only about skateboarding. Forget Nicky Diamonds, forget Biebel’s shredded chicken breasts, forget everything Chris Cole has done since In Bloom. Just go down among the skyscrapers, those great monuments to capitalism, and chip away at their marble footings with no goals other than to land something cool. Don’t film it. As our patrons at Nike might say, just do it.
