People define generations through generation markers. With Generation X it was grunge music, so Nirvana and flannel and all that. The Baby Boomers had Civil Rights which constituted the Hippies, Racial Equality and an increase in Women’s Rights. The Greatest Generation before them had World War II. Most readers and myself would be Millennials who are characterized by 9/11 and the birth of the internet. The idea is that each generation has a some event that creates wide spread shared experience of sorts, which in turn shapes the generation members. I’d say a lot of the readers on here would at least remember what it was like before the internet’s prevalence, how life was different, how we as a people had to conduct our lives differently because of it. It’s kind of like that.
BMX has it’s generations and generation markers too. Only in BMX we refer to it as Old School, Mid School, New School. It’s not that old where there is more but I have a feeling as time passes new periods names will pop up. It’s kind of happening already with some people defining early midschool and later midschool differently.
I’d say the Old School generation is marked heavy racing roots and the birth of freestyle. I wouldn’t say “ride everything” mentality is a character of that era cause I wanna say it’s more of an era where people did ride everything but they were also trying to figure out how to ride in general creating the basics.
I’d say Early Midschool would be defined by the DIY movement aka ride owned brands. These guys were more of the “ride everything” mentality guys. BMX has had it’s years to figure out the code and the tricks, there standardization happening. I’m sure a lot of kids thought they were the first to do some trick but most of basics are laid out already. VHS was the dominant form of media.
Late Midschool is X-Games generation definitely. It’s an era defined by a lot of corporate entities that pushed BMX into the spotlight and created a lot of riders in the following years for it. At this point I’d say Props is a generational marker. It determined the style and taste of riders all over. Ride everything is still a mentality that’s heavily prevalent but you start to see specialization particularly with street, developing it’s own separate culture in a sense. There is a strong focus on independent skateparks like Chenga especially in the Midwest and East Coast. DVD’s and magazine are still the dominant form of media. I’d say when it comes to media diversity this era had the most. In the later years TheComeUp and the web would start to make its transition to the New School Era.
The New School-Era is definitely the TCU/Instagram generation. Vlogs, Instagram are the biggest forms of media. HD is a thing but even more than HD, i’d say the phone camera is the more appropriate generation defining equipment. Traditional DVD’s and print are an underground segments and major producers like Shook, Props, RideBMX, TransworldBMX, BMXPlus, DigBMX are all kind of dead in a physical format way. There a higher focus on creating an individual brand over a team aspect that BMX loosely had before. Street is the most dominant and at times seems like the only discipline in focus. Street plazas are becoming the mainstay style of park. Traditional park, dirt and flatland are becoming increasingly more specialized. I’d also make the argument that BMX lost some of it’s individuality by appropriating more skate culture in an effort to be more mainstream. I think also one could make the argument that would define the TCU and Instagram separately cause the culture of the time behaved differently, like Early New School and Late New School. The only tying aspect in both is the idea of the self branding though.
I wrote all this cause I got sidetracked thinking about this section. All cause I wanted to call this a modern classic but determined it might be more super late midschool, then got around to trying to define what that is. Definitely the tail end of all that if the argument can be made but timeline wise, it’s hard to categorize. ALYK has a strong team aspect in their independently produced videos which is very late midschool concept (VX and Super 8 combo!). Ryan Howard has also been around for a bit and I believe is product of the whole Ohio Chenga Winter session which is also very late midschool. This section is great though. It’s one of the last sections that really made a dent in my skull before I got oversaturated with everyone and their mom trying to push their boring riding to my head through Instagram. I’ll talk about how great Ryan Howard’s riding is some other time though.
Ryan Howard
Kisses Over Babylon by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
ALYK - Still Here. (2011)
Edited by Scott Marceau
