You might remember Decline’s first video, Xola 955, which made the rounds on Free and some of the European media platforms a year ago — it included the clip of the guy flying perpendicular into a wall, and down a drop for a frontside wallride burned into the memory of anybody who saw it.
Decline is a skate crew based out of Mexico City, and ever since Xola 955 wrapped up, they’ve been filming for Lo Siento Emmett, the video we are honored to bring you today.
A common symptom of these days and times is describing anything that happened in the past three years as “last year.” If you said that December 2020 night when we all bundled up to watch Homies 2 get premiered on a Grand Street handball court in ten-degree weather was “last December,” people probably wouldn’t even blink.
But nah, Homies 2 is over two-years-old now.
Consensus in the skateboard world is a rare and fleeting thing.
But for a sweet moment in time there, we agreed on a few things.
For example: if a ledge is on fire, it is not the best place to administer a switch crook. Or that a pond of toxic sludge is not the ideal place to roll away from an ollie.
But even those onetime uncontroversial viewpoints have been shaken in recent months; the lessons from those two beautiful idiots with the gas can have — shockingly — been learned.
We now inhabit a different world than the one that debuted Noah the Brand’s first video in October 2020. That premiere was projected onto a makeshift white sheet pinned to the Tompkins fence, at a time when nobody could hang out indoors en masse. Alex Greenberg’s follow-up to Jolie Rouge is unbranded (that random dude in the comments asking what happened to the Noah skate team will remain perplexed), but feels like a continuation of that initial project.
Us members of somehow still-functioning society are no strangers to pendulum swings: anything that veers too far to one side is due for a correction. Safe, digestible art gets confronted by messy experimental art. An army of skaters in slim highwaters eventually gets run over by a parade of Big Boys and their imitators.
Except is boring art ever more than a reappraisal away from being a “return to form?” Can your pants really be out of date and not simultaneously years ahead of their time?
