5/16/2023 0 Comments Skater poserIt’s a complex, antiestablishmentarian worldview informed by years of living outside the law in a drug-addled, pre-tech San Francisco. Phelps is credited as developing what would become Thrasher’s overarching narrative. In skating, the Thrasher brand is personified through Phelps, as depicted in Willy Staley’s excellent profile for The California Sunday Magazine in March 2016. Mix a skateboard with long, unwashed hair, sailor tattoos, metal music and some nasty “bails,” and you’ve got the non-skater’s idea of Thrasher. And thanks to that combo, Thrasher is dominant, aside from the pretense that comes with being “The Bible.” But lately, the magazine’s unapologetically brazen voice has been boiled down to a sort of formula by people looking to leverage skating’s cool factor. “We don’t cover all that crap.” With the advent of online media, the magazine finds itself relying on key verticals – web videos and social media, in addition to independently-hosted contests – to remain popular amongst skaters. “Anybody can cover a hard trick in the Mountain Dew contest,” says Phelps. Phelps insists that “No one can tell the magazine what’s cool,” and accordingly, Thrasher has been generally consistent in its aesthetic and attitude for its 35-year existence. In other words, Thrasher’s highest, most emblematic honor isn’t reserved for the “best” skateboarders – it’s for the inimitable ones. After all, they’re the legends who performed tricks for which there are no shortcuts. And the rhetoric surrounding “Skater of the Year” is almost entirely founded on how hard they worked. Within the magazine itself, you might notice that Thrasher dedicates valuable page space to telling the backstory behind every featured photo that’s because the unseen battle of skateboarding – trying a trick for hours, sometimes days, before pulling it off – is ultimately what garners respect. Some people that win “Skater of the Year” only appear in one large-scale video per year, if that – which renders the award a measure of quality versus quantity. Skate companies produce videos as a kind of marketing tool – and although lengthy, big budget productions are still the gold standard shorter, more frequent releases are currently the norm in the YouTube age. In the case of this year’s winner, Phelps says he picked Anthony Van Engelen for “services rendered” – in other words, dues paid over a 10+ year career. “I’m not gonna give the award to some Johnny-come-last-month, flavor-of-the-week guy,” explains Phelps. Thrasher’s preferred style has the most parallels with hardcore punk movement of the early ‘80s: the skater takes fundamental tricks and executes them while moving faster, in places no one has done them, and, perhaps most importantly, makes it look difficult. As skating becomes increasingly framed as a sport (it’s on the verge of being included in the 2020 Olympic Games), a skater’s approach or body language becomes their defining characteristic among peers. There’s a reason why certain skaters will never win the award, despite performing the most technical maneuvers – style. Unlike the fashion industry, which rewards the popularity of a label – like who’s been seen in it, and its number of appearances in editorials – “Skater of the Year” can’t really be quantifiably justified. In skating, Thrasher’s annual “Skater of the Year” issue is the must-read news of the season: the magazine celebrates the skateboarder that has most accurately embodied its de facto mantra of “Skate and Destroy” over the past 12 months. In fashion, that would be Vogue’s fall fashion issue. Every good magazine has one issue that can’t be missed. Under legendary Editor-in-Chief Jake Phelps, the magazine has earned the nickname “The Bible” amongst skaters, referring to its judicial role within the community – its hallowed pages are where skaters are made into legends, or satirized into obscurity. In a similar way that The New York Times has a writing style that is literally copied by writers and editors around the world, there too exists a Thrasher-style of skateboarding, though no definitive handbook exists. While the magazine was originally started as a platform for Swenson and Vitello to promote their skate brand, Independent Trucks, Thrasher has since transcended its original purpose to become the most influential skate magazine in the world. So of course, as a skater, it was jarring to catch the magazine repped by models and fashion pundits outside at presentations in early 2016. Seminal skate magazine Thrasher was founded by Eric Swenson and Fausto Vitello in 1981, and has always represented a sense of incensed opposition to the status quo – within the skate industry and outside of it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |