Scott Johnston | Quartersnacks

The 30 Phattest Outfits in Skate Video History: 1992-2012

Features & Interviews September 6th, 2012 · 12:56 pm · 101

Happy fall fashion week. We hope that you are fashion-forward during these next several days, and wish you the best of luck in sparking a brief romance with a lonely stylist’s assistant before the week is out.

In honor of this most festive of weeks, we have compiled a somewhat comprehensive guide to the best gear from the past twenty years’ worth of skate videos. Skateboarding didn’t just begin “embracing fashion,” as some misinformed outfits have recently reported. Fashion has been stealing shit from skaters for years. (Luckily, they left Javier Nunez’s City Stars jeans alone.) Here’s the proof: All the jerseys, sweats, camo, braids, insane patches, sweater vests and swooshy pants that you could ever hope for. Yes, there are omissions. No, it isn’t in order. Thanks to Roctakon, Boss Bauer, Sweet Waste, Jack Sabback and Jason from Frozen in Carbonite for their contributions to this post.

Links From the BBQ

Daily News May 29th, 2012 · 9:00 am · 2

Scott Johnston at the building across from the New York Stock Exchange. Sometime in the nineties.

Monday links on a Tuesday…

The rumor mill about Zoo York phasing out of skateboarding has been building for quite some time, but it’s finally official. Zered Bassett explains what happened, and why everyone except pretty much Brandon Westgate is now off the team. (Black Dave, Kevin Tierney, and the AMs are all still on.)

The team at Live Skateboard Media remixed Lucas Puig’s Transworld pro spotlight part (the part that brought back the noseslide) by throwing in rap music, Biggie interviews, those ever-so-popular VHS glitch effects, etc. Better than the original, though not the French Montana x French Mariano part we all envisioned.

On Memorial Day, the Green Diamond put together a tribute clip to Slappy Cove.

Random Flip Cam footage from the Flipmode Squad riding around Queens and occasionally skateboarding.

Some kids take the PATH train into the city, skate 75% of the spots between 110th and 140th, edit it to ASAP Rocky, and upload it to YouTube.

You know those waxed concrete triangular banks that were across the street from the Brooklyn Banks at the Verizon Building? Well, they tore them all out, except for the one at the end.

Rick Ross publicly stated that he had $10,000 for anyone who ran across the court during a Heat Finals game (sorry Boston fans, but you guys are just as insane as the overly optimistic Knicks fans from four weeks ago if you think you have a shot) wearing nothing but a MMG shirt. Some dude did it during a second round playoff game, got arrested, charged, held on $6,500 bond, and didn’t even get his money, presumably because he didn’t read the part about it needing to be a Finals game.

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Gang Starr, Skate Videos & the 90s

Time Capsule April 19th, 2011 · 10:33 am · 22

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.