The Chrome Ball Incident killed it this week. Reason 1: A Nate Jones post (“I think I’ve only seen Nate Jones maybe do about a total of 10 tricks… but when you look that good doing them, sometimes that’s all it takes.”) Reason 2: A Jahmal Williams post.
Between 2001 and today, I have probably watched Nate Jones’ Real to Reel part more that any other, therefore have no problem calling it my favorite video part, despite the obvious ten trick limitation. It’ll probably continue to have that status until Mike Carroll skates to Lady Gaga or Dylan Reider skates to Katy Perry.
Following the Kalis Epicly Later’d series, inquiries into the present-day whereabouts of Lennie Kirk reached a high-point. To give the world some answers, Hella Clips put up a Manolo “best of” remix, and has a three part video interview coming next week.
“But, anyway, not the old Seaport, the new one. That’s when shit got crazy. We didn’t really skate the Banks that much then. You seen it in the videos, Seaport was the shit back then. So we skated the Seaport, all day, every day. We would skate all night, sleep at the Seaport in the morning, like wake up on the benches, me, Brian, and Anthony. One morning we slept there, and motherfucking Lennie Kirk was there. We woke up with Lennie. Lennie praying and shit, and chanting, doing all kinds of wild shit. And that’s when it went all crazy, after Lennie Kirk showed up. Everything was wild. Everything went downhill.” — Ian Reid
It has been a quietly monumental week for New York City skate footage, at least from a historical perspective. While the Skate NYC Apple Juice documentary is quickly working its way over 5,000 YouTube views, several lesser-exposed video clips have been released to accompany it, and they might be even more precious than the doc itself. I have no clue who “skinnypoo” is on Youtube, but he just uploaded a fifteen-minute gem of raw, late-eighties New York footage featuring Harold Hunter, Hamilton Harris, Jamal Simmons, Ryan Hickey, and even Steven Cales, all in their teen years. We’re talking people who already have sparse video appearances throughout their regular skate careers, let alone footage of them skating Tompkins in 1989.
These videos, along with the documentary from earlier in the week, have quickly managed to fill in the aforementioned late-eighties/downtown gap that the Deathbowl doc glossed over. It’s amazing how there is barely any Banks footage throughout the videos, yet plenty of Midtown, World Trade Center, and Tompkins stuff, not to mention a few cutty East Village spots, including the (now blocked-off) manual pad in front of P.S. 19 on First and 11th, and the two-stair curb next to the NYU dorms on 9th Street between Third and Second. You can go two decades hearing about an era of skating that was barely documented outside of a few iconic Shut or Harold Hunter photos, and then out of the blue, someone unloads thirty minutes of never-before-seen footage. The stuff that turns up on YouTube is absolutely amazing…
There isn’t exactly an abundance of video coverage for New York in the late-eighties and early-nineties. There’s obviously Vallely’s Rubbish Heap part, and Matt Hensley in Full Power Trip (and I guess the NYC section in Future Primitive, but 1985 isn’t the late-eighties…feel free to include links to anything that may have been missed in the comments), but none of those guys are actually from New York. Even the Deathbowl documentary glossed over this period, only tackling it from the “history of Shut” angle.
Well, God bless all the neglected storage spaces throughout New York. NY Skateboarding posted Apple Juice, a mini-documentary by Skate NYC, a skate shop that was in operation from 1986 to 1990 on Avenue A and 9th, which happened to be stored away in some dusty box for years. It’s not exactly a full-fledged skate video, but a previously unseen look, at least from a cultural standpoint, at what skateboarding in downtown New York looked like at the onset of the nineties. Features Harold Hunter, Jon Carter, and others, with a variety of locations no longer with us, including the World Trade Center, The Brooklyn Banks, and the original three-stair ledge version of the Fuji Building on 52nd Street and Park.
“All these kids, they have such fear about getting older, and they’re so happy being fourteen or fifteen. Boy, that is such a distinction from when I was a kid. All we wanted to do is get older, we couldn’t do anything out our age. These guys have a whole world that is defined on every level by what they do, and the only fear of getting older is that you’re going to lose what you have now.”
April 19th marks one year since Keith “Guru” Elam passed away. While there are plenty of sites to read about the impact of his music on a grand scale, the fact that Gang Starr probably occupies the upper tier of “Most Songs to Appear in Skate Videos Throughout the Nineties,” if you were to tally up individual artist appearances (at least as far as rap is concerned), will receive zero mention.
If you’re currently in your late-teens or early-twenties, you most likely began skating in a period bookended by Fulfill the Dream (1998) and Yeah Right (2003). In a time before the internet became a daily onslaught of new music, and you had to ration your money between skate videos and actually purchasing CDs (or scouring Limewire, Kazaa, or whatever spyware-infested file sharing service you chose to use back then), skate videos themselves provided a window to music / rap that wasn’t necessarily on BET, MTV, The Box, etc., or older songs that you were too young to have experienced when they were actually released. You didn’t necessarily have to be one of those kids who organized their first iPod by skate video title as opposed to album, but it’s hard to deny that videos played a much larger role in shaping music discovery ten-plus years ago than they do now, when everything is available. Without the internet, or the presence of an older, more knowledgeable sibling, skate videos introduced plenty of nine, ten, and eleven-year-olds in that period to rap that did not necessarily begin with shiny suit era Bad Boy and end at Jay-Z. (Although it is a shame that skate video soundtracks shunned the “Tunnel Banger” sub-genre at its height.)
One of those key moments was Steve Olson’s part in Fulfill the Dream, which introduced me, and a whole bunch of kids just like me, to Gang Starr, as our formative years of becoming pop culture / musically aware occurred in that four-year drought between Hard to Earn and Moment of Truth.
“Above the Clouds” came from what would be the last great Gang Starr record, but there was an extensive period preceding 1998, when the group’s music was in a whole grip of 411s and a slew of memorable company video parts as well.
