Old People Ruin Skateboarding
Skateboarding used to piss off old people. By and large, old people love rules, and what they love even more than rules themselves is enforcing them. Skateboarders, conversely, by and large love to break the rules, and what they love even more than breaking the rules is pissing off people who try to enforce them. It’s a perfect cycle: skateboarders skate at a spot that is not technically approved for skateboarding; old people get annoyed and try to get them to leave, bestowing upon the skateboarders a kind of prideful defiance that yields, in a weird but understandable way, a validation of their rebelliousness and thus their self-perception and raison d’être. This raison d’être is then verbally and gesturally communicated to the old people by the skateboarders, setting them off even more, and so on and so forth. The cycle escalates until it is terminated by either some third party, such as the police (when things get hairy), or by a sudden onset of defeatism, either on the part of the old people (when they eventually get tired) or on the part of the skateboarders (anyone can take only so much of being yelled at), or by the skateboarders running out of tricks or having landed and documented the tricks they wanted to do and now just wanting to get stoned.
It is perhaps appropriate to point out that skateboarding is, by nature, loud, detrimental to the street furniture thus misappropriated, and more often than not involves groups of adolescents or young adults—predominantly male—who do not always display what is considered socially acceptable behavior. The expression of personal freedom inherent to the misuse of urban architecture and the neglect of etiquette is what makes skateboarding so appealing to young people in the first place.
But what happens when skateboarders themselves age and become old people? Anecdotal evidence suggests that growing older almost always entails a certain degree of calcification of one’s mental flexibility and thus restricts, in some form or another, the ability to accept realities other than one’s own. Call it stubbornness. Case in point: mature professional (and by all accounts retired) skateboarders who refuse to leave well enough alone, as in counting their blessings and stopping putting themselves in the limelight. Gerontic pro skateboarders, also referred to as “certified legends,” appear, inter alia, on podcasts; advertise dubious investment strategies; become conspiracy theorists; find Jesus; hit their spouse; quit substance abuse and talk about it at length on the aforementioned podcasts in a sort of uncomfortable, zealous way that makes bystanders question the sincerity of their newfound sobriety; become rappers; involve themselves in the cesspool that is the manosphere; and generally make fools of themselves.
What they do not do anymore, however, is piss old people off. They have become the old people pissing everyone else off—just not in the way old people uninvolved with skateboarding piss off skateboarders.
All of this would be easy to shrug off, because who gives a fuck what old people think? You can go skate and have a good time without watching the Olympics or other ultra-commercialized, yucky contest formats sponsored by energy drinks and car manufacturers. You do not have to listen to “legends” rambling on podcasts, and you certainly don’t have to buy any of the products they so ambitiously advertise.
The problem is not people, or skateboarders, or “legends” getting old per se. We’re also old, comparably, and we know that writing these lines makes us look very much like a strange hybrid of perpetual teenagers and pontificating old men — not unlike those old geezers we’re criticizing, ironically (also note the strange absence of women, which should tell you a thing or two). Despite this pot calling the kettle back type situation, the true problem seems to be that many “legends” use their legendary status and clout in the industry to call the shots. They promote skateboarding as a subset of youth culture, but their promotional efforts are not for skateboarding itself; they are for the products they want to sell: energy drinks, investment schemes, jewelry, whatever the fuck. They are interested in anything but skateboarding. And the money thus generated does not flow into skateboarding, but into shady brands or assets that they profit off of. This is not promoting youth culture; it’s cultural exploitation.
Compounding this issue is that “legends” are well connected within the industry and are particularly involved with large corporations that, precisely because the “legends” are “legends” and thus respected in the skateboarding industry, embrace their marketable legendary status and listen to them. This means that skateboarding is becoming more corporate, more streamlined, more boring, and less cool.
Cranking the market machine, “legends” drain the raw, rebellious energy that makes skateboarding such an authentic experience and leave only a soulless, Olympified husk. Authenticity, by its very definition, cannot be generated, produced, and marketed at will. It can only come from within. Authenticity has to be itself, for itself.
At the same time, the market dominance of large corporations hence supported by the “authenticity” of “legends” block market access for up-and-coming, more disruptive brands. Not that there are a great number of them, anyway: it seems as if skateboarding has been afflicted by widespread lethargy and complacence. Blind Skateboards, for instance, rebelled against the Powell-Peralta era of skateboarding. The graphics on early Blind decks still belong to some of the most controversial artwork in skateboarding. Unfortunately, you’d be hard-pressed to find this daring commitment to aggression and disruption in today’s brands. Nobody dares to break the rules. “Legends” used to break the rules, and now they’re the ones making them.
This is all a very long-winded way of saying that skateboarding used to piss off old people. Now it’s pissed on by them. Which is not surprising if you think about it, as old men usually do not possess the best bladder control.
Text by Joseph Möller
Illustrations by Sebastian Fuchs
