Skateboarding, leisure, and capitalism -- Part I

Here's the thing. I've been a skater for more than half my life. When I was young, I quickly became fixated on the skateboarding subculture -- watching videos, reading magazines, hanging out at skateshops, going to spots, etc. And for a time, I completely embraced the skater identity. In the past few years, though, I've begun to question some of its defining characteristics. It's not a rejection -- I still check multiple skate sites multiple times a day, watching videos, following industry gossip, and all that shit. But what I've begun to see as somewhat hollow is this idea that skateboarding is somehow "different" -- this is the reason many of skating's most revered talents give for why they started skating in the first place. Skateboarding was a departure from "team"-oriented sports, geared more toward personal creativity and individual fulfillment rather than scoring the most points in a given amount of time. And I get that. And I respect that, for many people who say this, it was true.

Yet what has begun to irk me a bit is this fetishiziation of that "outsider" status, because in some ways I think it clouds a more practical consideration of how skateboarding functions as a subculture. As stated before, I think that the subculture of skateboarding in many ways cultivates creativity and open-mindedness among its participants -- I know I learned a lot about my physical surroundings, music, film-making, video production, precisely because skateboarding inspired me to be more active and participatory in each of these realms.

But what begins to bother me is this ongoing complaint, levelled en masse especially by industry vets, that the skate industry is changing for the worse. Of course, this has been a gripe before. Each extant generation of skaters and industry folk has a certain constituency with gripes about the forthcoming one. We hear complaints nowadays based off an idea that skateboarding is becoming "standardized." Large corporations take controlling shares of skateboardings profits, leaving skater-owned companies with the short end of the stick. Contest series like the Maloof Cup and the Dew Series look to perfect and expand on the X-Games contest model, featuring a relatively stable roster of known skaters taking home six-figure prize winnings. Paralleling the narrative of corporate vs. "skater-owned" companies, this second observation about "jock" skating also implies that the truly creative skaters are being squeezed out, unable to support themselves from the meager pay they receive as professionals. Even in the case of skater-owned board companies, there is a common lament that standardized graphic "series" have begun to replace the highly-personalized nature of skate graphics in the 1980s and '90s. (The most (in)famous of these boards have been immortalized in coffee-table books and have gone for $1000+ on eBay).

We live in a first-world nation, wherein leisure has become a massive industry unto itself. The contradiction to keep in mind here is that the wide range of activities  enjoyed as "leisure," i.e., the free time spent outside of work and other responsibilities, necessarily involves the labor of others. This is true, too, of skateboarding. At first, skateboarding was a leisure activity invented by its participants by cobbling together equipment not intended for the novel purpose of skateboarding, linking skateboarders only indirectly to leisure industry per se. For nearly all of its history, however, professional manufacturers have supplied the vast majority of equipment. Because the majority of skateboarders are not paid or otherwise compensated for their time while skating, the majority of its participants engage in it as a leisure activity. The fact that we enjoy the fruits of a relatively functional industry which caters to such specialized needs is the thing to keep in mind. I recall an old Anthony Van Engelen interview where he talked about locating necessary skate parts in Russia: "You can't get shit there... A kid had a Tracker Truck and some other random Indy. They're both totally different-sized trucks -- like a hot rod, jacked in the back, dropped in front."

Keeping this in mind, let's also consider the idea (widely-accepted in skate circles) that certain talented people ought to be paid for their skateboarding abilities. This is the assumption behind popularly-regarded opinions on who "deserves" to be professional. (Here I recall the several-years-running controversy over Anthony Pappalardo's efficacy/relevance as a professional, given dwindling coverage and a seeming drop in the quality and difficulty of his publicized skating. This is only one especially well-known example.) There is a purportedly meritocratic approach to appraising the quality of different skaters. Fanaticism in skateboarding, i.e., developing "favorite" skaters and so forth, is a highly personal phenomenon. Different skaters like different professionals for any number of reasons. I don't have a problem with this, per se. But what is employed in worries over the Maloof Cup and so forth is this fallacy that skateboarding is, or ought to be, going in a certain direction (as though it's an entity unto itself). It ought to preserve the "authenticity" characterized in street skating, i.e., in spaces not intended for skateboarding. It ought to value "style" over more quantifiable criteria of difficulty. And "skateboarding" here implies more than the activity itself; it signifies the activity of skateboarding as it is defined through an economic rubric, in which professionally-sponsored skateboarders play an essential role.