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.

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