Better Late Than Never — Frozen in Carbonite Presents: Song of the Summer x Video Part of the Summer 2022

[Ed. note — Wish Young Nudy dropped “My Gang” in late May. Any video that begins with the boys cutting their pants into shorts and hitting Biscayne Bay on jetskis is a bonafide summer anthem. Leaving this headliner as a tribute to the summer that could’ve been ❤️]

Words by Frozen in Carbonite

The world is a different place from the one in which I started this series a decade ago (not gonna go into all the ways here.) In my second summer of not drinking, I set out to find a new location to vibe out; the local bar wasn’t hitting like before.

So, I regularized my gym’s rooftop pool. For some reason, my gym has a pool on the roof in addition to the indoor lap facility. Although not as sick as those famous NYC rooftop hotel pools, it’s still pretty dope. Most importantly, the ratio at any given time of day is roughly the opposite of the one at your average skate function.

ANYWAY, in addition to that, the way in which music is disseminated in 2022 could not be more different from 2012. In summers of yore, record companies dropped S.O.T.S. candidates around the end of March and radio programmers decided which five songs to play fifty times a day.

Like mad other shit, all that is dead as …dead.

Now, the TikTok algorithm reigns supreme — that’s why you hear so many two-minute songs with no chorus ‘n shit. More importantly, the app functions like a wormhole that sucks in music from different points in the space-time continuum and deposits them into the present day. So, over the course of twenty seconds, my son’s feed might include The Smiths, “Careless Whisper,” and some obscure jazz song that MF Doom sampled or some shit.

I used to say “circles, bro, life fuckin’ moves in circles” — now it’s like, “life fuckin’ moves in a giant space hourglass with the gravitational pull of a million galaxies.”

ANYWAY, along those lines, I based this year’s Song of the Summer nominees on the zeitgeist in addition to the regular calendar criteria. Vid parts stayed the same.

Drake: “Massive” x Wade Desarmo’s Define Part

[Part begins at 2:37]

Canadian excellence, baby!

Drake and Beyonce both dropped house records this summer. Of course, skaters are up on the cool shit eons before everyone else; if you count Ty Evans’ music supervision of Genesis, we’ve been on this wave for 25-some-odd years. Of course, I fucked with it heavy. In a possible social media marketing strategy, Drake documented on Instagram his ridiculous antics in Ibiza, like having an underling shoo away a bee, using one of those 17th-century opera fans, and sneering “How ya like that, JOEY” when “Pump It Up” came on at a day party in Malaga or some shit.

Middle-Aged Jewish Guy Drake on the loose in Ibiza is a skit that I would have written for this series in like 2012. You can’t make this shit up!

Once in a while, a human being becomes the ultimate version of themselves: full self-actualization. No one knows what self-help Instagram accounts P-Rod put him onto, but fellow Toronto resident Wade Desarmo dropped his best part after seventeen-odd years in the game in the Primitive full-length, Define, which recently went YouTube platinum.

Ever since he shocked the world with his Top Dollar part, we knew the kid had something. His part in Parental Advisory was a step in the right direction, but this three-song brings it all together: the ledge tech, the manuals, some medium-impact rails, and the baseball jerseys (Babe Ruth and Mookie Betts.) Still trying to ID the football jerseys. Wade’s style has that thing where he executes every trick with a neutral spine, like a perfect deadlift. See also: Bobby DeKeyzer.

Canadian excellence, baby!

The S.O.S. Band: “Just Be Good To Me” x Jake Johnson’s Right Here For Pablo Part

[Part begins at 41:34]

Also in the Primitive vid, for some reason they used three consecutive songs that sampled/interpolated the S.O.S. Band’s 1983 banger. Fellow old heads might remember it from that one Richard Pryor special HBO ran all the time way back when. However, the aforementioned jam and most of their catalog (“Sands of Time,” etc.) remain absent from streaming platforms.

On skateboarding’s platform of choice, one artist’s absence stands out the most: Jake Johnson. However he dropped his longest part since Cons’ Purple in this summer’s GX tribute to their fallen brother. We got the usual #jkjhnsn wizardy including probably the most authoritative bump-to-bar switch kickflip of all time.

DVSN: “If I Get Caught” x Heitor Da Silva’s “Vice Versa Love” Part

This DVSN song, an ode from the mind of a dude who cheated on his girl, hit in the middle of the summer and seemed calculated to generate Twitter Discourse™ — which it did — in addition to inspiring a slew of answer songs, or whatever they’re called. In any event, the swagger level necessary to even conceive of a monologue with this thesis is off the charts.

Along the same lines, a similar swagger level is necessary to switch heel manual a legendary Barcelona spot in Pit Vipers and follow it up with skating over to the boys and slamming a beer. Anyway, back in April, Heitor and videographer Austin Bristow dropped an almost eight-minute part of the latter destroying the most photogenic spots in the Mediterranean, in addition to London and other destinations. The AVN Awards of spot porn, if you will.

The kind of part where the whole exceeds the sum of the tricks, that Mary J. song and the lifestyle footage tie the piece together into a cohesive statement like no other video part released in 2022.

Midnight Star: “Midas Touch” x Vincent Touzery’s Sensibles Part

Also on the European vacation tip, Sensibles was the skate version of this summer’s deluge of Summer Trip To Europe™ coverage on Instagram: “Everyone’s in Paris killing it bro! Wish you were here!”

While Paris continued to function as the 2022 version of 1992 San Francisco, back here, HBO dropped a little show called The Rehearsal masterminded by this guy Nathan Fielder. I watched a couple episodes, and truth be told, couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on.

However, according to the Twitter hive mind, this guy is like a combination of David Simon, The Sopranos creator guy, Eddie Murphy, and Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ; at one point in July, about 75% of my timeline was Fielder-related. One Fielder fan account or whatever posted an old video of the lead actress (?) doing some kind of eighties pop-lock routine to “Midas Touch,” and it went viral as fuck.

Along those lines, Touzery may get lost in the shuffle on a team loaded with strong personalities, but any footage he does drop is fucking gold.

Yeat: “Rich Minion” x Louie Lopez’s “Honor Roll” Part

I did not go see Minions: The Rise of Gru this summer. However, like the die hard Gen-X type of guy that I am, I did attend a screening of Top Gun: Maverick. It fucking ripped.

However, the latest installment of the Minions franchise was just as impossible to escape, as were the adjacent memes, Instagram filters, Tik Tok stunts, frozen desserts, etc. Along the same lines, Louie Lopez’s 2022 rampage has held a similar stranglehold on the skate media landscape. Therefore, it’s only right to set his part filmed entirely at one of the foremost film schools in the world (with a battalion of famous alumni that varies from Greg Araki to Ron Howard) to the hit single off this summer’s signature film. One question, however, remains: How do you frontside flip on a skinny-ass USC ledge like that?

Blasterjaxx & Timmy Trumpet: “Narco” x Josh Wilson’s “What If God Said” Part

[Part begins at 7:58]

The closer.

At the beginning of the summer, I dropped sixty bucks on this Amazon deal where you get to pick a team (I chose the New York Mets), and stream all of their games. Pound for pound, the best content value of the year. Baseball teams play every day, so over the course of the summer, the dudes and the announcers became my bros. Thanks to the impeccable SNY production team, closer Edwin Diaz’s walkout music — a techno (or whatever subgenre) track called “Narco” — went viral and burrowed itself into the head of every Met fan and opposing hitter.

Mariano Rivera’s “Enter Sandman” was a little too middle-of-road; “Narco” sounds like a futuristic bullfighter intro or some shit.

Plus, like the title.

Fuckin’ drugs, bro.

ANYWAY, consistency is the primary criterion for a lights-out closer. DC Shoes signed Wilson at the trade deadline, and based on this almost four-minute part and the behind-the-scenes feature in the follow-up “Bronze TV Channel 56,” immediately started throwing nothing but 103 MPH gas. Furthermore, if skate team managers employed Sabermetrical statistics like VORP, BAPIP, wRAA and shit like that, Wilson would be at the top of whatever category quantifies minutes of footage logged per United States dollar of per diem. The song also lines up with Bronze’s love for Queens-centric lore, like those commercials in the Bronze 56k radio mixes for some used car lot in Forest Hills or some shit.

Unfortunately, as the summer came to a close with one of the final nice (not fake-nice) days, so did the Mets’ season as they got one-hit shut out by the Padres. Maybe Seinfeld was right:

Like Jamie Thomas at Embarcadero, they tried to juice it too hard.

EXTRA SHOUTOUTS: Ross Norman in “Brass Tacks,” Future “Wait for U,” Will Marshall in What If God Said, and “Munch” (blew up juuuust a little too late to make an impact on the summer.)

Previously: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017