Skateboarding And Selling Pop Culture

It seems to me that the history of US pop youth culture is the history of its ever-more rapidly executed commodification, of teenagers developing something of their own, surfing or rock and roll or comics, and subsequently having that thing taken away from them by Big Business and sold back to 'em, gutted, rebranded, and at a profit. Once upon a time, at the dawn of teen culture, this process might take years. Now Top Shop seems to sell the fashion before the fad has even been invented.

Sakteboarding culture would seem to me the perfect example of this process. I'm currently re-reading The Answer Is Never, Jocko Weyland's sparky, personalised potted history of the sport. What I dig about skateboarding, is that it really is the Local Summer Fad That Took Over The World. I mean...everybody has those games they invent over the summer holidays and play to death with their buddies, some mutation of baseball or hacky sack, the rules becoming ever more complex, the vocabulary expanding, limits and challenges met and exceeded, new records set and broken. Pop music, drinking and soft drugs may be involved. Truth be told, me and my pals have never really grown out of this impulse. Last summer three of us spent hours playing Egg In Glass, a 'sport' which initially involved taking it in turns to throw a small egg-shaped percussion instrument into a pint glass from a distance of roughly two meters. When this eventually resulted in a successful attempt shattering the pint glass, it transformed into Egg In Boot, which was basically the same, only with the glass replaced by - get this - a Boot. As the evening progressed, the rules solidified, points systems were put in place, successful throws led to bitter arguments about whether the thrower was 'far enough' away from the Boot, claims were made for particular styles and angles of trajectory, and ever more impressive levels of Egg In Bootery were attained. By morning, we were the 1992 Olympics US Basketball Dream Team of Egg In Boot, and my friend Stephen Ward was able to land The Egg in The Boot from halfway across a hotel car park, which was really something to see.

Despite its obvious appeal, Egg In Boot has not become a world-conquering phenomenon enjoyed by kids across the globe, nobody is internationally famous for it, no multinational sporting goods company has produced technologically advanced Eggs with names like The Boot Blaster 4000, Sky Sports 4 doesn't show The World Egg In Boot Championship Live From The Budokan at half 2 in the morning, there are no cash-in Egg In Boot movies, pop songs, comics, saturday morning cartoons, pinball machines, trucker caps, video games or Happy Meals, me and my friends have not become the world's first Egg In Boot billionaires, Barack Obama hasn't been 'pictured' playing Egg In Boot at some photo-op, and infact nobody has heard of Egg In Boot anywhere ever, until now, and I figure maybe about 6 people read this regularly, and one of them is one of the dudes who helped invent Egg In Boot in the first place.

But...this is essentially what did happen to skateboarding, or at least to the Dogtown, modern style of skateboarding, skateboarding as we understand it today, the style of skateboarding which turned into a multibillion dollar industry. At some point in the mid 70s, a buncha punk drop-out kids from Venice California ('Dogtown'), a ragbag of young freaks digging on Led Zep, Sabbath, beers and reefer, take a sorta lame, kiddy, faddy sorta enterprise, and get so insanely good at it that the world is forced to take notice, and the big money starts rolling in, and allofasudden..its a big deal, and it's here to stay. The Z-Boys, as the team were known, didn't plan for this. They were, as they say, Just Doin' Their Own Dang. For their own pleasure. Inventing ever-more insane stunts. For kicks. Taking it to the next level, within their own frame of reference. And it became something else. It Blew Up. Imagine that. Imagine the stoopid-ass sport you and your pals invented one summer becoming a bone fide world-wide Big Fuggin' Deal.*

(*Of course, this is simplifying The History Of Skateboarding to a ridiculous degree, but there's some truth to it.)