That's the natural state of innocence - their reference frame is how the experience feels (I'm going fast and almost falling over!). When the scene takes over, the reference point shifts to how it looks - the raw experience is overtaken in importance by progress and status and comparison.
I accept this valid criticism of "posers" but I'd like to add that there's a strange loop here. It feels alien to me, but lots of people I know like to watch videos of themselves doing things (e.g. choreographed dances). It certainly does help to see how to improve, but also they get satisfaction from seeing themselves do the thing.
When I make things, I often spend time confirming the work is done. And seeing what I actually made.
It is part of the psychological experience of making things for me.
Seems like some sort of gatekeeping and old-man shaking his fist at youth to me. The overwhelming majority of people skateboarding today are regular kids and young adults who are just in it to have fun. If their techniques are more advanced, its probably because technology has improved and also because they're emulating the things they see professional or otherwise experienced skaters do, but what's the problem with that? They're still having fun, aren't they? That's the point of it all, isn't it?
And buying a shirt means you don't have personality? Is personality all about happening to know a guy who does custom T-shirt printing? What makes one more authentic than the other? Seems like nonsense.
You have it backwards. The shirt is neither necessary nor sufficient. sporkydistance was dogging on poseurs. deadfread was explaining why a t-shirt was ever an indicator (and even when there's someone handmaking shirts for your thing they're taking as many sales as possible).
The shirt validating the identity is a wrong interpretation of what was written. But it's also a normal perspective these days, one core to social criticism this conversation is getting at.
The t-shirt didn't represent having a personality. It represented than 'I am around this community enough I have at least interacted with Bennie'. Someone wearing a Kmart t-shirt saying 'ah did you get that from Bennie' would be the exact cred/personality as having a Bennie shirt.
Kind of like bluejeans. You can buy them predistressed but the wear patterns are different than if you made them yourself. Maybe most people can’t tell but the true in group of the subculture can.
The people that lived it often can't buy the nicest gear and stuff, or if they did it's because it involved real sacrifice and dedication. Historically, they fucking made it themselves because it wasn't something you even COULD buy if you wanted to. So seeing some rich kid duplicate your drip overnight just because they can rubs people the wrong way. And I kind of get it: it's counterfeit. Its the same disdain people have for anything not made by a real artist but passed off like it is. They show up with all the nicest shit duplicating your real effort and struggle, but not having done the work.
A lot of those poor kids only have that thing in their life and the crowd dedicated to it because their homelife sucks.
Most the skaters I grew up with that were really good were that way because they suffered. They were out skating after-school because there was no family dinner and warm welcome waiting for them at home. We were our own family and support. When a friend of mine handed me down a box of old gear so I could put together a new-to-me board , that saved me months of struggling to come up with the cash to replace a board that got stolen.
And honestly the skaters kids were the most welcoming group I ever saw. They took in all the otherwise rejects of society. But no one likes a poser.
True.
> ...really good were that way because they suffered. ... But no one likes a poser.
Yup. Stolen valor.
Is that not what makes them the true in-group? Especially the first two words. You can be "in" and not be a jerk, even eager to bring others in. In fact I'd recommend it.
That's the overstatement of the century. In group / out group always has gatekeepers by definition.
Not sure where you grew up, but I sold skateboards at a bike & ski store for a while in the early 80's and skaters were absolute dicks about their self-enforced hierarchy. Skater culture claims to be inclusive but holy fuck that's a lie if you accidentally buy equipment just a tiny bit above your skill level.
I got to see this first hand: as the point of retail sale for their replacement parts, they confided in me because they needed to buy things from me, so they would tell me who the posers were and rip on them mercilessly. Just like any other ingroup.
please actually read my comment next time.
Likewise with drinking. There are subsets of drinkers. The ones passing 40s around in a public park aren’t who you see in the ad material. The alcohol industry lobbyists would rather this subset not be highlighted at all in fact because it paints the rest of the industry as unsavory.
No one agrees, of course. In any case, for me, it's not something I'd force on my kid. Sort of goes against the spirit.
If someone's expectation is that a green Mohawk means someone is throwing off the cultural legacy and expectations handed down to them, then yeah, a toddler with a Mohawk is pretty ironic. If someone just thinks is a haircut that looks cool, obviously not.
If someone thinks or remembers when Mohawk had that meaning, they might read into the fact of it being changing to a simple mainstream aesthetic cosmetic option.
Toddlers want things and they don't want other things. Their parents don't permit much agency, because.
I'm probably agreeing with you but I wasn't sure of your implication.
I actually agree with your point, but there's a really solid devil's advocate side to take against it, too.
Just sayin'.
"It's not just commodification. If you were a punk in the 80s with a green mohawk, you might find it cute to put one on your kid in the 2000s. I have long hair, my son has long hair. This isn't a commodification of a culture, it's me, like every parent ever, using my culture to inform how I raise my kids. What am I going to do? Not dress and present my kid how I want to and how I identify?"
He is literally defending his decisions to "dress and present" his kid against my comment about commodification, as if I'm attacking his decisions. He didn't even understand my point: in the 1970's you would have been ostracized (or arrested) for having a green mohawk. In the 2010's, kindergarten teachers ooh-and-ahh over it.
That's the DIRECT result of the commodification: it became mainstream because people spend decades diffusing it into normality. He totally missed the point, and then got defensive.
Actually, in the context of today's internet discourse, the reply is defensively invoking both the "appropriation" and "not-all-men" tone in the same reply. Impressive.
sure, and anarchy means total chaos and no organization at all. who says that punks can't discuss or give a fuck, lol.
Leading up to and during the Covid pandemic he recorded a large number of videos on recording craft and techniques for free viewing.
Died young, but of course…
And now within subcultures are sub-subcultures. Within skateboarding, everyone hangs with each other but at the same time, your Baker kids aren’t your Creature kids and they aren’t your Andy Anderson/Rodney Mullen kids.
Some people may join a subculture to be “non-conformists” but most people pick up things because they like it. Sometimes what you like isn’t something everyone else likes and a subculture is born.
There are still millions of these pockets of subcultures that are completely invisible to most people on the outside.
Zines and DIY screen printing are still very much alive. If you live in a big city, check out some small local punk venues if you want to re-connect (or connect if you want to check it out). And of course, you can always start skating again (but maybe wear gear the first day).
Heart in the right spot. Execution has room to improve.
In what way? Seriously.
Nowhere in time has freedom of speech been enshrined and creation been easier. But we just can't seem to take advantage of all the freedom and tools that we have at our disposal.
Humans (with rare exceptions) are happiest when operating in groups.
Not much news herw
Proclaiming "I believe in anarchy" is childish cute nowadays not because of an evil capitalist plot, but because it is out-of-place retro to a different time. Also it was always childish, but back then it was segregated only inside a community of adolescence, so no one noticed
> So my only strong belief is that you should think of style first and foremost as social language, not purely as artistic expression. Aesthetics are rooted in culture—punk, skate, prep, workwear, etc. Identify a cultural language that resonates with you.
So yes, to borrow the example of the GP, you had to know someone with the proper equipment to silk-screen an anarchist shirt, which necessarily meant the only way you could really get one was that way. Now, you can have dozens of them, in innumerable colors, styles, and designs. And I mean, I think it's fair to say that the old folks back in the day would've happily bought that shirt too rather than going into a buddy's workplace after hours and doing it themselves.
I don't think the criticism "you aren't a real X you just bought it" really holds water. I'm sure the wide availability of these things necessarily makes things easier for that no-doubt real slice of owners who have no idea what that A means or why it matters to a community of people, but at the same time, it also makes it tremendously easier for all those in that community to dress how they want to dress, to perform their identity in social spaces, which in turn allows them to find one another more easily.
Like I say this as a brain-rotted boy from the suburbs of the cultural wasteland of the early 2,000's: I had no identity in school, and that is a problem people. I have experienced firsthand the broad rejection you feel when you do not fit into any given social group, and don't know how to join one. Would a fashion sense have spared me that? I don't know, I had a myriad of other issues going on. But when I read Derek's writing about how clothes function as a language that we can communicate with one another without words, and form communities based on shared values? I hurt for my former self. I wish someone had helped me back then so I could fit in more. Maybe my loner, extremely contrarian self would've found companionship and not have had such a rough go until I was in my mid-twenties and started actually figuring out who the hell I was.
Here's the book:
https://store.thebaffler.com/products/commodify-your-dissent
One of his examples is that music and clothing companies realized there was a market for things like T-Shirts with Anarchy symbols on them. This stuff didn't exist at scale in the 1970's, you needed to know someone with a silk screen, or live in a city like Chicago or San Fran that had the first wave of non-conformists. But 30 years later you could walk into a mall and come out looking like you had a personality even though you just bought it.
What's really funny, watch "Dogtown and Z-boys", a movie about the rise of skateboarding with lots of footage from the 1970's. The first "tricks" they do will make you say, "What? Where's the trick? He just bounced on his board", and then compare it with today's batshit insane achievements. Skateboarding was peak commodified in the late 1980's (Thrasher magazine helped) early 1990's, but in the 1960's it was ... a simpler time and the outcasts looked like normal kids having fun compared to today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogtown_and_Z-Boys
You can see how something goes from a "weird kid activity" to "every kid does it".
Like green mohawks on toddlers in the early 2000's. Edgy in 1970's, preschool in 2010.
Man, I'm showing my age. :|