Tags: Skating, Sinead O’Connor, skateboarding, punk rock, Thrasher Magazine
By Ludo Reynolds
It’s July 2015, and the concrete wasteland where B&Q used to be is something most Peterborians don’t bother to look twice at as they cross over Town Bridge. ‘An ugly waste of space’ some might think to themselves, if they acknowledge it at all.
However, as 12-year-old Josh Stocks ducks through the hole in the wire fence that attempts to deter trespassers from this barren plaza, there are few places in the world he’d rather be. With a D.I.Y ledge, a couple of launch ramps, and a speaker thumping Gang-Starr at his disposal, Josh’s summer holiday plans commence.
“When I got my first skateboard, I was always chilling with skaters older than me,” says Josh – now 20 years old and studying abroad in Germany, but still a keen skater nonetheless. “Someone would always bring a decent speaker to the session, so we would just skate all day, chat shit about random stuff, and listen to music.
“There’s definitely a soundtrack in my mind that I associate with my first couple years of skating. It was a lot of 90s and early 2000s rap, and maybe the odd reggae tune.
“Those two just fit the atmosphere so well because some of the more aggressive rap songs would get you super amped to send a trick you couldn’t commit to, and then the others were a lot more mellow for when you were just sitting around talking and stuff. It was just a cool community to be a part of, and when you’re young and you start skating and listening to hip-hop it feels like the most rebellious thing ever.
“Another thing that I always enjoyed was making skate edits and putting music behind them. At the end of the day if I had enough clips filmed, I’d spend all evening on my iPad editing them together and picking which song worked best for the video.
“This was when I branched out a bit in terms of music, so these edits had all sorts of stuff in them. I remember liking indie a lot at the time. I’d put all my edits on YouTube, so that whole process just made skating even more fun and motivating to land tricks.
“On rainy days when I couldn’t really skate anywhere without waterlogging the shit out of my board, I could still sit in and play Skate 3, and the soundtrack for that game had so many bangers that I still have on my Spotify playlist now, like ‘Shimmy Shimmy Ya’ by Ol’ Dirty Bastard, ‘Put Em In Their Place’ by Mobb Deep, ‘Debaser’ by the Pixies…just so many sick songs that I still associate with skateboarding.
“As I got older, that’s when I started to make my own music. Being exposed to great music at a young age from the older skaters is something I’ve found pretty helpful when it comes to inspiration and developing my own style.
“Skateboarding’s all about creativity, and music is as well, so I think I’ve been able to apply the same part of my brain that helped me with skating to my songs. I still always find myself writing bars about skating, or just trying to make beats that would go hard at the skatepark.
Like Josh said, skateboarding has always had that element of rebellion. Since its advent in early 50s California, skating has evolved and progressed in the city streets. Its exposure to such a vast amount of culture and general urban chaos has seen it become one of the most eclectic sports of all time. It’s no surprise then that over the years it has attracted music genres that parallel its own anti-establishment and nonconformist attitudes.
The emergence of punk-rock in the 70s for example has had a massive influence on the skate scene, and by the 80s skaters had developed their very own subgenre: skate-punk.
Bands such as Suicidal Tendencies, J.F.A, and The Faction took to the scene – the latter band’s bass guitarist being Steve Caballero, who in 1999 was awarded ‘Skater of the Century’ by Thrasher Magazine.
The Faction’s lyrics in particular focused on the disobedient skateboarding ethos of the 80s, with their most popular song ‘Skate and Destroy’ covering subjects such as the turbulent relationship between skaters and the police, to their more superficial rivalry with BMXers. It was music by skaters for skaters, so these bands were creating art that was a direct and authentic reflection of what it meant to be a part of the sport at the time.
Despite their prevalence in the scene, ‘skate music’ still isn’t defined by just punk and hip-hop. Every skateboarder is an individual in their own right, and whilst they may all belong to the same community, interests, style and especially music taste can still vary massively from skater to skater. To get some more insight into how music taste is a non-linear experience for skateboarders, The Equaliser spoke to Ronny Calow – a pro skater for Death Skateboards since 1998.
When asked what sort of music he liked as a young skater, Ronny replied: “I’d listen to, I mean, anything that was in a skate video really. My music taste isn’t limited to one genre. Now it’s just anything I hear on a skate video and I like it. It could range from Sinead O’Connor to Burzum.
“It’s from one end of the spectrum to the complete other. Music also goes with someone’s style. You see skaters around and look at what they’re wearing – they’re probably wearing something that the musicians they like would wear.
“Skateboarding opens you up to different genres that you wouldn’t usually listen to,” Ronny continued, “and these genres become something else when it’s got good skating behind it – so the songs become completely different. It’s not just a song anymore. It’s like when I was younger – a prime example is that Sinead O’Connor song ‘Nothing Compares To You’. I hated it.
“I thought, ‘this is shit, this is old people’s music’, and then in the last year or so it’s been on a skate video, and it just went so well with the section that it made the song completely different. You might listen to a song and think, this is a bit wank, and then you’ll see it on something that you really like and the song completely changes for you. It opens up something else.”
So, whether it’s simply a means of elevating the ambience of a session, or boosting the visual aesthetics of a skateboarding montage, music will always maintain a reciprocal relationship with skateboarding.
In a sport that encourages individuality and freedom of expression , the soundtrack that accompanies skating is limitless. It doesn’t matter whether you’re bombing a hill to Beethoven, or carving a bowl to The Beatles – as long as those wheels keep on turning.