Eric Peña Rivera

I Shall be Released

It took me two whole weeks to create the right ambience to sit down and watch Sour III. Truth be told, the right moment never came and feeling a little out of sorts I figured I would give it a shot and try and squeeze it in amidst everything else. The result was a deeply introspective one. I marvelled at the novelty of the skating and drifted off into a meditation about the snug fit between the history of jazz and skateboarding. I tried to position Sour III in this timeline and got lost somewhere between post-bop and free jazz.

The conclusion I have is pretty straightforward and might be of interest to anyone trying to theorise the weird position skateboarding is currently in. Simply put, there are only so many notes in music, and only so many possible variations in what you can do with a skateboard. Please can we surrender the NBDs and instead pursue HIBD. No more ‘never been done’ and instead ‘how it’s been done’, what sort of combination, what run up, follow through, and combination. It’s also about the document, who, where, when, angle, pedestrians, roll out… etc. If Jazz is about improvising over standards and reworking conventions, so might be skateboarding. People re-work St Louis Blues and All The Things You Are endlessly. Just as someone continues to outdo the last trick at Hollywood High. Hopefully, we can move on and innovate and keep a healthy relationship with the past. What remains interesting is keeping that tension between familiarity and novelty. Music is about tension and release. I suspect a good part of skateboarding might be too. In crafting a line, we seek to communicate something familiar while pushing the newness to the realms of acceptability. Too safe, too whack, too stiff, and it goes wrong. The tension must be released, otherwise it snaps.

As the final part of the video rolls on to the screen with Simon Isaksson tre-flippin his camera, Bob Dylan starts to play. It’s not the original rendition of the song but the live one by ‘The Band’, a star studded cast. It’s a reworking. Just like the Nina Simone version that Tom Knox skates to in the Isle video Vase.  Another Euro video in 4:3 format. Skateboard videos are notoriously formulaic. We expect that and we want that. But we also want the nuance, the difference. Just like Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” we want the familiar in a different face.