Is skateboarding really a subculture anymore?

To be a skate­board­er means spend­ing some part of most days watch­ing, think­ing about, and dis­cussing skate­board­ing. And though the same might be said for prac­ti­tion­ers of oth­er ath­let­ic pur­suits, there’s a par­tic­u­lar way that these extracur­ric­u­lars of skate­board­ing quite actu­al­ly are skate­board­ing. In oth­er words, skateboarding’s bor­ders extend well beyond the real time activ­i­ties of doing it, all that stand­ing and crouch­ing and push­ing around on a board.

Skate­board­ers, as such, are all to some degree his­to­ri­ans, the­o­reti­cians, and pun­dits. We dis­agree con­stant­ly. The vast major­i­ty of these argu­ments are pro­found­ly, and proud­ly, sil­ly. We argue over trick nomen­cla­ture and the prop­er amount of can­dle wax on a gran­ite ledge. We get heat­ed about whether drop-down man­u­als and ride-on grinds are as fried as some of us (right­ly) claim. This, to be clear, is a good thing. There is no rule in skate­board­ing to which there is not also and imme­di­ate­ly an excep­tion. Plus, it is mean­ing­less. To dis­agree over the mean­ing­less is a chance to find one­self orbit­ing that increas­ing­ly rare human event — hav­ing one’s mind changed. 

Two sep­a­rate but relat­ed argu­ments have, how­ev­er, shown remark­able for­ti­tude among skaters. The first con­cerns the dis­tinc­tion between art and sport, which, more on this in a moment. The sec­ond involves what we might call ​“authen­tic­i­ty,” which for skate­board­ing relies on a basic in/​out phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy, a bor­der between ​“core” skate cul­ture and every non-skate-native inter­est in the world. It’s that famil­iar ten­den­cy toward growth and the evan­ge­lism that would fos­ter it, set against the very spe­cial­ness that makes the thing capa­ble of attract­ing more believ­ers. Can the pre­cious, sacred object sur­vive expo­sure to the solic­i­tous inter­ests who would seek to lever­age it for their own gains? Or the impure of heart who would come to it lack­ing innate belief in, much less com­mit­ment to, what makes skate­board­ing unique?

Con­sid­er a moment from August of 2019, when hun­dreds of inter­na­tion­al skaters con­verged on a skate park in Malmö, Swe­den. Pro skaters Rick McCrank, Ryan Lay, and a hand­ful of tal­ent­ed oth­ers are prepar­ing to per­form for a crowd. In a twist, though, every­one in atten­dance is sit­ting, most of us in fold­ing chairs arranged into neat rows with clean aisles, many with note­books in our laps. McCrank and Lay and the oth­er experts share three loveseats, their legs crossed pro­fes­so­ri­al­ly, with pot­ted plants between them and even a cof­fee table up there, replete with a water pitch­er and glass­es. Nobody is rolling around. Nobody is bleed­ing or even sweat­ing, except per­haps from nerves.

About twen­ty min­utes into the show, McCrank turns to Swedish skate­board­er John Dahlquist and asks, ​“What you’re doing here is sort of insti­tu­tion­al­is­ing skate­board­ing. You’re bring­ing it into a for­mal envi­ron­ment, this wild ani­mal that’s kind of like this beau­ti­ful can­cer spread­ing everywhere.”

Dahlquist, you see, is vice pres­i­dent of a sec­ondary school, Bryg­geri­et Gym­na­si­um, whose skate park is host­ing an inter­na­tion­al con­fer­ence called Push­ing Board­ers. How­ev­er nor­mal this sounds to you, I can­not over­state how strange these words would sound to a skater in 1993.

“Get­ting a grade in skate­board­ing,” Dahlquist replies, ​“it’s insti­tu­tion­al­is­ing the shit out of skate­board­ing.” And because he’s been a skater far longer than he’s been a vice prin­ci­pal, Dahlquist says he did have reser­va­tions about what makes skate­board­ing unique, and how insti­tu­tion­al forces might threat­en that unique­ness. But then, ​“I realised that skate­board­ing hasn’t been cool since East­ern Expo­sure 3.”

And oh, the awk­ward­ness of our laugh­ter, the ways we shift­ed in our seats. The project of inde­pen­dent film­mak­er and col­lege dropout Dan Wolfe, Under­achiev­ers (East­ern Expo­sure 3) appeared in 1996, the year of Girl’s Mouse, Toy Machine’s Wel­come to Hell, and World Indus­tries’ Tril­o­gy. It was indeed cool as fuck. Lever­ag­ing the grit and cold of an east­ern US coast that’s a full coun­try away from the industry’s Cal­i­for­nia head­quar­ters, the project sold, shock­ing­ly, upward of 30,000 copies.

And then? Thanks in large part to two non-native and uncool projects, the X‑Games in 1995, and Tony Hawk’s Pro-Skater in 1999, skate­board­ing there­after became more and more exposed. And, to Dahlquist’s point, less and less cool. A ter­mi­nal momen­tum seemed to take hold after Hawk’s 2002 Bagel Bite ad; shilling for frozen piz­za snacks struck essen­tial­ly every­one with an opin­ion on the mat­ter as a bridge too far. Some­thing had bro­ken. A dam, maybe.

The romance between skate­board­ing and the glob­al con­sumer mar­ket hasn’t stopped since. I don’t imag­ine I have to bela­bor this point — you have noticed recent Palace col­labs with McDon­alds, The Gap, and Crocs. Just this week and in the con­text of what we call skate­board­ing, I have heard the term ​“solo­pre­neur” spo­ken with­out irony. I have wit­nessed live and in per­son the strate­gic chore­og­ra­phy behind a ​“col­lab leak” for a lim­it­ed edi­tion Nike. And I have heard a skate shop own­er speak a plain­tive hope that the upcom­ing Paris Olympics yield a sto­ry­line com­pelling enough to dri­ve young peo­ple into the store.

Worth men­tion, too, is skateboarding’s own recent slide toward whole­some­ness. Com­pare, for exam­ple, Bak­er Has a Death­wish (2008) to its sequel released this year. Both films are 67 min­utes long, and both are co-brand­ed by the leg­endary Bak­er and its off­shoot Death­wish, hew­ing to their image of Ange­leno street cru­sades. But as we hit the 29-minute mark in the first, we see a very drunk and unpantsed Dustin Dollin kick­ing through beer bot­tles to the open­ing cry of Arthur Brown’s ​‘Fire’: ​“I am the god of hell­fire.” At 29-min­utes into the sequel, here’s a smil­ing Stu Kirst hug­ging Rowan Zoril­la while Bar­ry Manilow sings ​‘Mandy.’

And unlike cas­es where mar­ket forces have lever­aged skate­board­ing into prof­it with lit­tle con­nec­tion to its val­ues, with Death­wish and oth­ers, the change has come from with­in. Con­sid­er the hugs and high fives that film­mak­er Ty Evans turned into cen­tral pil­lars of skate­board media. DGK just gave Dar­ren Harp­er and his daugh­ters, Tink and Demi, a shared pro board. Or con­sid­er Phoenix, Arizona’sSkate after School, Seattle’sSkate Like a Girl, and dozens of oth­er inter­na­tion­al pro­grams, more every year, that use skate­board­ing for ped­a­gogy and to cre­ate inclu­sive youth spaces. If the in/​out phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy of authen­tic­i­ty is cen­tral to a subculture’s per­sis­tence, then sure­ly such a wide­spread revolt against gate­keep­ing would sig­nal that subculture’s end. I might find this stuff cool, but none of it is cool, exact­ly.

Noth­ing por­tend­ed, or seemed to por­tend, a big­ger shift in skateboarding’s sub­cul­tur­al sense of self than the run up to the 2020 Olympic Games. Ear­ly rum­blings had an air of inevitabil­i­ty to them – we saw Nike come into the indus­try. We were not fools, entire­ly. By August 2016, when the IOC inclu­sion was made offi­cial, I’d imag­ine that more Amer­i­can skaters were wor­ried over the Olympics than Don­ald Trump’s march to pow­er. Now there would be coach­es, train­ing rou­tines, and drug tests. Is there any­thing in the world of sport, per­haps the world peri­od, more main­stream than the Olympics?

My own con­cern was about reduc­tion. By mak­ing offi­cial skateboarding’s sta­tus as com­pe­ti­tion, by insti­tut­ing and insist­ing upon a scor­ing rubric, I feared the Olympics would ren­der moot — lit­er­al­ly with­out point val­ue — the count­less stu­pidi­ties and unquan­tifi­able joys that make it spe­cial. In Tokyo back then, in Paris this year, and almost cer­tain­ly in Los Ange­les in 2028, the skate­board­ing of the Olympics present to a new gen­er­a­tion of skaters a ster­ilised fac­sim­i­le thereof.

To that end, it’s dif­fi­cult to imag­ine last year’s flur­ry of Amer­i­can rightwing media sto­ries about the ​“unfair­ness” of trans ath­letes com­pet­ing in skate con­tests with­out a shared belief in that offi­cial, unnat­ur­al rubric of sport. Nor can one imag­ine the ring­leader of that con­ser­v­a­tive media scrum, a goofy and ghoul­ish pod­cast­er named Tim Pool, claim­ing that he and his indoor ilk are going to ​“take over skate­board­ing” with­out suf­fer­ing a pro­found mis­un­der­stand­ing. It’s a sil­ly con­quest metaphor uttered by a fool, yes, but also it betrays the very same impulse that has led some of us to bemoan what skate­board­ing lost along the way.

I am hap­py to say that I no longer wor­ry about either the Olympics or con­ser­v­a­tive pod­cast­ers and their effects on skate­board­ing. This is because I’ve stopped think­ing of skate­board­ing as a sub­cul­ture, or even for­mer sub­cul­ture. It has tak­en me a long time to under­stand what skate­board­ing is, but not because it isn’t obvi­ous. Skate­board­ing is a medium

To ask if skate­board­ing has lost its edge is like ask­ing if music has lost its edge, or lit­er­a­ture has lost its edge. Such ques­tions aren’t just dif­fi­cult to answer, they’re inco­her­ent. Unless, that is, you are say­ing ​“music” and ​“lit­er­a­ture” as metonyms for the record­ing indus­try or book pub­lish­ing. Our shared, basic under­stand­ings of music — the arrange­ment of sound through instru­ments toward an expres­sive and affec­tive goal — and lit­er­a­ture — the arrange­ment of lan­guage and some­times image toward the same — pre­sume a spec­trum of gen­res. Through these many gen­res, every micro-exper­i­ment of the avant-garde and each new cor­po­rate-fund­ed, washed-out trend alike, will emerge, evolve, and inform the next.

Skate­board­ing is the arrange­ment of the human body through a four-wheeled tool toward expres­sive and affec­tive goals. As a medi­um, it also includes all of the visu­al, lin­guis­tic, son­ic and oth­er cul­tur­al objects that grow from these bod­i­ly arrange­ments. Over almost sev­en decades, this expres­sive medi­um has evolved to host a grow­ing list of gen­res and sub-fields that result in an ever-expand­ing array of appli­ca­tions. Today that includes a broad field of social­ly engaged, thought­ful, and oth­er­wise rad ways of mak­ing skate­board­ing. It also includes all sorts of embar­rass­ments, like rightwing ding­bats, skate shops owned by cops, and $5,000 Louis Vuit­ton boards.

But these are the marks of a robust, thriv­ing medi­um. See the Japan­ese Olympic wun­derkind who dom­i­nates com­pe­ti­tions, and also the dirt­bag San Fran­cis­can hill bomber. The unim­peach­ably cool busi­ness mogul who fore­grounds Black cul­ture while dab­bling in mod­el­ling and wear­ing a near lit­er­al crown in New York City. See the dual-coast post­mod­ernists rev­el­ing in the skate­board­ing of exhaus­tion, carv­ing a wob­bly, per­fect line between irony and sin­cer­i­ty. Danc­ing long-board­ers and the seri­ous, Philadel­phia clas­si­cists car­ry­ing the torch of bag­gy jeans and thick-soled DCs and flat brim New Eras. The late-arrival adult who pads up and dis­cov­ers new life in learn­ing to drop in and carve the mel­low shal­low ends, whol­ly dis­in­clined to ollie.

And just as each sub-genre has its own con­ven­tions, so too will the most excit­ing skate­board­ing of the future be that which merges or upends genre stan­dards of form and style, suc­cess and failure.

That which we find cool relies on a kind of secre­cy, which is also a kind of scarci­ty. Skateboarding’s birth was nar­rat­ed in the lan­guage of rebel­lion, and for three decades this mythol­o­gy defined the bor­ders of a sub­cul­ture that took pride in stand­ing apart from that which was pop­u­lar. But even as these bor­ders fell and skateboarding’s cool­ness seemed to die, the activ­i­ty did not. Instead, it became a secret whose pow­er no longer depends on its keep­ing. Any­one can skate­board. Also, skate­board­ing is very hard to do. Have you ever lis­tened to a child pick up a musi­cal instru­ment? At mak­ing jazz, the child fails woe­ful­ly. At mak­ing R&B, the child has lit­tle chance. But at mak­ing music? Or at danc­ing, for that mat­ter? These are skateboarding’s points of com­par­i­son. This is the way we should speak of it.

It is all but cer­tain that peo­ple will con­tin­ue to drop out of school to pur­sue skate­board­ing. It is equal­ly cer­tain that oth­ers, now, will devote long aca­d­e­m­ic careers to study­ing it. This both­ness, these pos­si­bil­i­ties, can only hap­pen once a sub­cul­ture has died.

A ver­sion of this sto­ry will appear in Huck 81, which is com­ing soon.

For more Sum­mer of Sport con­tent, click here.

Enjoyed this arti­cle? Fol­low Huck on Insta­gram.

Sup­port sto­ries like this by becom­ing a mem­ber of Club Huck.