Turning the Page

Angel and the Papi Brand dudes dropped the new installment of their Bronx-centric video series, and it’s the most extensive one yet: Bill$ 4 Inflation went live last week. Features great parts from Angel Fonseca (who’s still getting better and better) and Justin Adams + other homies, and a lot of dives into Bronx spots that only the locals skate.

Nothing is touching Limo edits right now. It’s not even that much skating, but the eight minutes fly by in Limosine’s North Carolina trip video featuring the entire team.

Ryan Mettz made an extended edition remix of Max Palmer’s “Spiked Off” part from March with more guest clips, B-sides and unseen clips.

Feels like fuckin’ yesterday: The Shady One dove into some old footage and made a “Summer With Friends 2016” montage that provides a vivid snapshot of downtown Manhattan skateboarding just seven short years ago. Features pretty much anyone you would’ve seen in a Johnny Wilson video circa 2016.

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An August To Remember — How August 2023 Became A Landmark Month In Skate Video History

📝 Words by Ian Browning
📷 Headline Photo by Morgan Rindengan Courtesy of HUF

If you count everything in the Thrasher Junk Drawer, ten full-length videos, plus another handful of solo parts and edits came out in August 2023. We’ve come to expect that sort of programming when marketing teams try to get a thumb on the scale during the S.O.T.Y. race, but the end of summer has traditionally been a much less productive time of year for skateboarding.

At least until this year.

Lakai’s Bubble, Pass~Port’s “Trinket,” and Johnny’s Vid all came out in the same week. Palace’s Beta Blockers and WKND’s Rumble Pack came out on the same day, creating a nineties skater version of the meme about how eating a bag of Takis would overwhelm and kill a child from the 19th century.

What are the chances? How did it happen? And did anybody realize what was coming down the pipeline? I called a handful of skaters and filmers who worked on the projects that were released that month to find out why it was so stacked, and how it felt to navigate the spotlight.

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Feels Good To Be Here

Photo by Zach Baker 📷

File under: No way you haven’t see this yet, right? Cyrus, Nick Matthews and Mason Silva pay tribute to Keith Hufnagel covertly + overtly in the new HUF x Nike SB edit.

“I grew up thinking that skaters are just skaters. They just do what they do, not like, ‘Oh this guy has got spiked hair and a choker, let’s get him on.'” Jenkem interviewed Josh Wilson about coming up and growing up ❤️

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The WKND Dudes in Connecticut + Albany

Ollie in front of Supreme by Max Wheeler. No, a different Supreme. Photo by Bobby Murphy.

The scope of skateboard travel got way smaller this past year-and-a-half. Connecticut — that lil’ big state that is basically just outside The Bronx — posed an interesting case study. Following the thaw-out from the most depressing winter of our lifetimes, our first trip out of New York was to CT. We came armed with inspiration from “Your Big Cheesecake,” a March 2021 Connecticut video that was blurbed about on here in the winter, and originally found on Skate Jawn. In it, you find a vast network of cutty, underseen spots sitting in small cities that are all a shorter drive away than Philadelphia. It wasn’t until just recently that our brains were forced to understand that maybe there was some skateboard escape nearby that wasn’t one we have been to dozens of times before. The rewatchability of “Your Big Cheesecake” definitely helped hammer that point home.

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‘You’re Ruining The Aesthetic’ — Five Videographers On Skate Video Music Supervision In 2019

Graphic by Requiem For A Screen

Skate videos have long been a portal for musical discovery. Except in recent years, it has began to almost feel like …filler. If one editor finds success with an untapped genre or artist, there is always an avalanche of imitators. If you find that “how has nobody skated to this?!”-song, the answer to your question is often “someone has, it was just in some video you missed.” And a popular song? Forget it, it has been in twenty kids’ IG edits since the day it got uploaded to YouTube.

(Don’t even start with the dude editing his “Trip to N.Y.C!” video to Big L right now.)

Choosing a song that makes an impact, and gets people tracking it down is hard when our attention spans are their fickle 2019 selves. We reached out to five people who routinely put out edits (i.e. not the guys dropping one full-length every few years) to get their thoughts on how the process of selecting music in skate videos has evolved.

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