So, Quartersnack’s are appealing more to “ifs” than “oughts” with their edits but that doesn’t mean that the ought isn’t out there. The reaction Dog has gotten online is a testament to this. Countless individuals have been eager to say that Dog is better than the latest official Girl release, Pretty Sweet, that Dog is in a sense what Pretty Sweet ought to have been. This notion of being in a way owed a certain kind of output from a skate company or a skater is widespread. In no other artistic endeavour (if that is how we choose to understand skateboarding as a pursuit) are the fans seemingly so eager to turn on the object of their fandom simply for not living up to expectations, expectations that due to our lack of knowledge of the specifics surrounding the skater’s output could potentially be unachievable.
I can’t count the amount of times I’ve read somebody online claiming this skater or that skater does not deserve to be in the position they are in based on the perceived dip in quality of their more recent output or that they simply are not producing enough. This idea that we as consumers of skateboarding are somehow owed a certain “quality” of skating to view is absurd in it’s self when one considers the subjective nature of appreciating skateboarding but gets all the more ridiculous when these ought-appealing naysayers call for some sort of punishment for the men that disappointed them.
For a culture that still desperately attempts to present its self as the refuge of the outsider and almost fetishizes the idea of not being in it for the money it just doesn’t add up the willingness many skaters have to state that any skater should lose his position on any team because he is not hitting their own personal, unknowable, arbitrary targets. When somebody doesn’t like the latest album from a favourite artist of theirs you very rarely hear the fan saying the band should be dropped from their label and never seen again. And yet this is the kind of thinking Anthony Pappalardo is faced with when he features in another ad of a 50-50 on a flatbar or Daniel Castillo is subjected to when he only has one trick in a team montage rather than a full length part, keeping in mind he is a good twenty years or so into his career.
Disappointment when it comes to skateboarding is not only natural but understandable. Some skaters have such a legacy that almost anything they produce simply can’t live up to their best work, especially now considering some of these greats are getting dangerously close to 40. But the notion that we are somehow owed something by them gets all the more crazy the more you think about it. Frankly if anyone owes anyone anything it’s us them for producing their best stuff in the first place.
If every piece of skate media we encountered was exactly as one would think it “ought” to be then this whole enterprise of skateboarding would have gotten very stale very fast. I was struck by something the ever quotable Jake Phelps said in the final episode of the recent Eric Dressen Epicly Later’d; “skateboarding doesn’t owe you shit, it owes you wheelbite in the rain”. Phelps was talking about old pro’s who felt hard done by as they were not being properly rewarded for their legacy or their part in making skateboarding what it is, but the sentiment can be just as easily applied to those who feel they are “owed” something by the pros they look up to. There is very little to be gained by talking about what skaters ought to do or the way skateboarding ought to be and just looking at three videos that came out this week I mentioned in the first paragraph, it seems pretty great just the way it is.
