Strangling Our Subculture
February 02, 2007 @ 11:11 AM
Imagine this…
The Lakai video is not coming out: Lakai is closing its doors. Emerica have started to make ice skates and no longer have a skate team. In fact there are no more skate teams, those boards in the shops no longer have amazing graphics and the art teams behind those graphics have all gone off to put graphics on deck chairs or something.
Andrew Reynolds has got himself a job down at the hardware store and that tour, the one that’s supposed to come to town, you know the one you’ve been dying to check out for a while? Well, it’s been cancelled. There are no new vids coming out, the magazines have all gone and except for watching old shit-quality footage on Youtube there’s no real way to check out a top new skate flick. Basically, the spirit of skating has completely died.
On the plus side though, you can go down to your local supermarket and get yourself a blank for about a tenner, in about three different wood stains, It’ll only last a day and if you liked that exact shape its too bad because there’s no guarantee you’ll ever get the same one again. The wheels you can get for two bucks are just as good as anything else, not that you can tell the difference because they are all blank these days, it keeps the price down right?
This kind of skate world is BORING, it’s dull, devoid of all the creativity and inspiration that drives our ever progressing art. This kind of skate world would see a lot of people quit, there will be nothing unique and no sense of subculture, the giant Starbucks industries will have won and we will no longer have the choices we do today.
Is this scaring you yet? It should be because our skate world as we know it is being strangled by the ever increasing popularity of blank boards. The problem is that when a blank board is sold, 9 times out of 10 the profit will go straight into the pocket of some cowboy and will never do any good for skating. When a legit branded pro board is sold, the profit goes towards keeping that pro skating, touring, making video parts and rolling through your town doing some flipity fandangle that’ll blow your mind, inspiring you to spend many a happy hour trying to recreate that trick, developing your style and giving you the laughs that skating is all about.
We totally understand that blank boards are cheap, it’s true, and skaters are usually broke, that is also true but next time you go to buy a deck, think about who you are supporting. It’s your money after all, so do you: 1) Make the fat cowboy rich, or 2) Hook up yourself with an art form that will keep growing, changing and progressing in a way that no outsider will ever get - cowboy or not.
Support your scene, support your local skate shop, and support skating.
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