One morning about two or three weeks ago, I did what every person in our omnipresent social media day-and-age does when he wakes up: I mindlessly scrolled through my Instagram feed. In between the occasional “artsy” photo of food or baby animals or whatever Snoop Dogg shared from the night before (usually something weed and/or travel related), I noticed something interesting.
You see, I made the wise choice to follow Pontus Alv [the founder of Polar Skateboards] on his personal/company account (@polarskateco) and witnessed in reverse his drunken celebration after he and Polar won several awards at the BRIGHT European skateboard awards show. Not long after this, I came across a video from The Skateboard Mag in celebration of Pontus’s “Guest Ed” article in their 108th issue. Transworld even featured another article by Pontus focusing on the (re)emergence of DIY spots in skating (Vol. 31/Feb. 2013). This is the second Pontus-focused article within the span of a year by Transworld, the other printed in Vol. 30/June 2012 and written by none other than the always insightful John Rattray.
Other small companies have received similar attention as well. In 2011, The High Five received The Skateboard Mag’s “Year’s Best Brand” award. Magenta and Palace have been regularly pumping out videos of their travels that have been going over well. Thrasher premiered Roger’s video on their site and then blew minds with Welcome skateboards weird-gnar filled All City Showdown submission.
Lately, it appears that smaller board companies, some of whom have never bought an ad in an American magazine, are receiving large amounts of attention by the shakers and movers in the skateboarding world. I am honestly surprised at the amount of exposure these brands have received from the bigger magazines. I mean, Transworld has an annual article detailing what we can expect from Street League! Why the fuck would they put Pontus in there?
After thinking about this for a while, I finally realized why I get excited about this exposure and, more importantly, what this exposure means to skateboarding more generally. The magazine coverage I’ve detailed above shows that skaters are still capable of seeing skateboarding in a more traditional light: away from boxed in and repetitive contests, away from multi-million dollar contracts and winnings, away from Mountain Dew commercials and Target sponsorships.
These companies, and the variety of smaller companies all over the world, provide a glimpse into skateboarding in its pure form and the importance it has in that state. These companies were organized by people that realized that skating was missing something. That it was moving towards a greedy center and away from the simple things that make skating worthwhile: sculpting a scene with other people who care, or pushing switch really fast with loose trucks, or high speed wallrides in smiley/sad face dress shoes. They took matters into their own hands and founded companies that place these messages at the forefront. This coverage is refreshing to see because it means that a lot of people believe that this message is important and needs to be shared with the subculture at large.
”These companies were organized by people that realized that skating was missing something. That it was moving towards a greedy center and away from the simple things that make skating worthwhile.”
In fact, now might be the most important time to spread this message. Skateboarding is currently in a weird position. As the “big three” corporate companies (maybe “big four” now that New Balance has thrown their hat in the ring) continue to wrest wall space from skater-owned shoe companies, there is a comfort in knowing that a group of skaters can come together with nothing more than some decks and a point of view that they believe in and still be supported.
Someone I spoke to once described the beauty of supporting skater-owned companies as making sure that, “the animals run the zoo” and nowhere is this more important than board companies. Which successful board companies can you name that do not have at least one well-respected skater involved behind the scenes? These smaller companies reinforce what is arguably the most sacred realm of the skateboard industry and maybe even the subculture in general. Board companies decide which skaters receive a significant amount of recognition. They decide who is deserving of the “pro skater” identity, enforcing an idea that skaters and only skaters have the right to choose who deserve that title and best represent skateboarding on a sponsored or professional level.
The emergence of small board companies illustrates a trend of skaters taking initiative and pushing back against outside companies. We are telling these groups that regardless of whom they support or how many people are on their flow teams, only skaters can be trusted with the most important sphere of skating and we’ll do our best to ensure that we continue to run it.
Finally, Pontus believes in the ability of skating to bring people together and contribute to people’s lives and communities. He believes that skating should be fun and “out there” before it should be boxed in and standardized. He believes in the importance of reappropriating forgotten space and utilizing it in a positive, constructive manner—moving forward and learning when the time comes. And the success that Pontus and Polar have achieved has come with him standing up and thinking about skateboarding as an action that has implications in people’s lives.
Skateboarding forces people to reevaluate their surroundings and their lives, understanding them in new ways. When bigger companies, regardless of what they make or who owns them, become repetitive and rely on merely copying one another, the subculture and its participants suffer for it. That’s why it’s important that Polar, Magenta, Welcome, Palace, and numerous other companies have not shied away from making waves in skateboarding.
Josh Stewart recalled that the first time he met Pontus, Pontus told him that skateboarding did not need overproduced videos like One Step Beyond, fully aware that he was speaking to the mastermind behind the Adio video. And more than just talk a big game, he backed it up by self-producing and releasing two videos that really can only be described as avant-garde. Magenta has released a series of boards paying homage to different surrealist and (post)modern artists. Welcome’s oddly shaped boards outnumber the modern popsicle shapes in every catalog they release. Palace’s boards depict dictators and images of tribal societies, and let’s not forget the controversy of mainly white guys skating in a video with a potentially racial epithet in the title with any N.W.A. songs conspicuously absent.
All of these actions defy the cookie-cutter formulae at place in board graphics and skate videos. Because few other companies move in this direction, it must be a dangerous business model. If it wasn’t, more companies would be willing to take these risks. All of these brands should be failing or maligned, but that’s not the case. They are lauded for their daring—and rightfully so. These brands are forcing skaters to step out of their comfort zones and take real risks with their products and output.
Because of these companies, skateboarding is becoming challenging again. These brands are forcing people to think about the companies they support and what they represent both inside the skateboarding world and outside of it. They are telling skaters that what they ride says as much about their point of view and their idea of skating as the skaters they like or the photos they hang on their walls.
Under these influences, skateboarding as a culture should no longer be seen as passive and thoughtless. We should not simply watch and forget the daily dose of online videos, go to the same boring skatepark to learn the next logical trick, buy whatever gear is needed regardless of what the company does or does not stand for. These brands, knowingly or not, are saying that skateboarding has changed all of our lives and it’s about time we start treating it with the respect and thought it deserves.
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February 12, 2013 2:52 pm
So skateboarding is in danger when Nike put out boards!
I sometimes wonder why there´s no “shape of the year” award in skateboarding. is it simply that the evolution stopped with the popsicle shape?
February 12, 2013 6:20 pm
Kudos on the article Rich, Great read!
I love the “the animals run the zoo” analogy, I couldn’t agree more.
When skateboarders run skateboarding, that’s when it stays pure and raw -but when big corporations like mountain dew, new balance etc stick their noses in; that’s when it gets tainted.
Enough rambling, good job dude.
February 12, 2013 8:05 pm
Perhaps you’re unfamiliar with Adorno’s theory of Negative Dialectics and Peter Burger’s Theory of the Avant Garde, but before postulating such opinions I suggest you familiarize yourself in the nitty gritty philosophical discourse you’re reaching for in this article, but missing by a longshot.
In Hegel’s words; “First as Tragedy, Second as Farce.” The nostalgia for skateboarding being a “romantic” activity is gone, we live within the corporate era of skateboarding and will not ever return from it. The transgressive act of destroying the city with a piece of wood and metal trucks has been pacified and moved to DC Skate Plazas. To think we will return to a time when this sense of self and place are coherent within the act of skating simply by buying into the right companies is utterly naive. We shall only see the corporatizing of such companies, not the little guy’s victory.
February 14, 2013 2:19 pm
All of your fancy philosophy books and 2 dollar words can’t change the way we feel. You are a pretentious and pessimistic fool and skateboarding doesn’t need you. Try thinking for yourself.
February 14, 2013 9:11 pm
Andrew, I appreciate you reading my piece and commenting on it. By claiming I’m going for a “nitty gritty philosophical discourse,” you’re making an extremely unfounded point merely so you can drop people’s names (side note: while I am no philosopher nor aesthetician, I am somewhat familiar with Adorno and Hegel [whom you have quoted here for no discernible reason]). As McLuhan has taught us, “the medium is the message:” the points and arguments one makes are constrained by the venue through which the points are being made. I was not writing for a philosophy journal, but an online skateboarding magazine. To bring in academic writers, especially ones as complex as Adorno and Bürger, would be inappropriate for my medium and would risk alienating rather than drawing in readers. I’d come across as some snooty know-it-all, writing this for merely my own pleasure and (potentially) holding it above the heads of a wide swathe of members of my subculture. And since I wrote this piece to be read, this alienation would be nothing more than simple mental masturbation versus trying to make people think and analyze their subculture (an aspiration that I believe I reached).
I’ll still take the time to respond to your points, however. Your mention of Bürger’s theory of the avant-garde is unfounded as the only time I used that term was in reference to Alv’s two films–both of which he produced with little corporate/mainstream sponsorship. As such, their formulation was not subdued by the mainstream’s ideas of what a skate video should be and not watered-down in the way that Bürger claimed avant-garde work would be. Perhaps the attention they garnered after can be interpreted instead as mainstream culture’s attempt to subdue an artistic strain that it does not understand and it perceives to be threatening?
Your description of the pacification of skateboarding via DC street plazas is laughable as the same argument can be made about skate parks, neither of which have stopped individual skaters (both sponsored and not) from skating the streets and other areas they are legally unable to, producing massive amount of footage at these locales while they’re at it. That comment is reductionist and reeks of a bitter attitude.
It’s rather early to say that these companies will only become corporatized since they are still very young. But even if this does occur, can’t we just shift our support to other companies that have resisted this corporatization? A less than ideal situation, granted, but still a possible method to resist the self-alienation that you seem to believe is currently inherent within skateboarding. You might say that I am naïve, but I say that you are pessimistic and have seemingly lost all hope in skateboarding as a subculture.
I do agree that we are living in a period of undue nostalgia and romanticism, but isn’t that the case with almost all forms of nostalgia? And haven’t enough people spoken on the dangers of holding earlier periods of skateboarding in a better light than they deserve.
I have not read Adorno’s “Negative Dialectics,” so I will not attempt to refute your mention of it extensively. However, are you attempting to argue that the identities I believe these smaller companies are aiding to foster have arisen already subsumed within the larger framework of skateboarding? I’m not sure I would agree with that. If I were to make an extremely philosophical argument, I would favor what I alluded to before: that this mainstream attention is an attempt to subdue these rising identities that are causing conflict with mainstream skateboarding, an action that we’ll only see the success of at a later date.
Again, I appreciate you reading my piece and your comment, but next time, you might want to think a little more about whether your ivory tower comments are appropriate for the intentions of the article and if you may be assuming a little too much about me. After all, when one assumes…
-Rich
February 14, 2013 9:25 pm
Mr. Green, Hegel did not say “First as Tragedy, Second as Farce.” Marx said that. He did so in the opening passage of his essay “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” For your personal reference you can find it on page 594 of the Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with basic Marxian theory, so before postulating such opinions I suggest you familiarize yourself in the nitty gritty philosophical discourse you’re reaching for in this comment, but missing by a longshot.
February 14, 2013 10:19 pm
Hegel never wrote that; it was Marx, you big dumb-dumb.
February 15, 2013 2:07 pm
I understand what you’re trying to say about buying into the right companies, but I can’t agree.
Until we’re making our own decks in our basements, the majority are going to need to buy skateboards from somewhere, and will often want to buy skateboards of those they like watching. I buy decks based on pros I like, and I don’t think that’s too crazy- they need to eat and I want to support who I like. Every dollar you spend is a vote.
I’ll vote for these companies over a giant any day, and there’s nothing naive about that. For example, If Polar got huge, but their team doesn’t decide to get blown out all over the Berrics, get sponsored by Mountain Dew or a sunglasses company, “compete” in that Maloof shit, etc then that’s an effective vote away from what a lot of us don’t like about skateboarding.
No need to pretend you’re a Ph.D here, nobody cares…at all.
Rich wrote a great article.
February 19, 2013 8:46 pm
Have to agree with you Andrew. As much as we don’t want that to be true, we’re imagining and that’s illusive. We might have hopes and dreams, but if it’s not going to be expressed, than those are just our words in empty room.
October 14, 2013 11:50 am
“The transgressive act of destroying the city with a piece of wood and metal trucks”
mmmm, you have a way with words. you should write a blog or something.
February 13, 2013 5:40 pm
European market is getting more and more local each year.whether it’s England, Germany, Sweden or Poland more skate owned companies spring to life and are doing way more for local communities than distributions f big worldwide brands.