Banger Fatigue And The Yearlong Week

‘Apocalypse fatigue’ is a vocabulatory buzzphrase leaned upon to capture a sense of dissociation, listlessness, and spiritual shell-shockedness, used early on in the context of eroding public focus on climate change, more recently applied to the Covid-19 pandemic, geopolitics, threats from malicious asteroids, and so on. A sense of international malaise, weaving somewhere between wonder and a concussion, can similarly be applied to the climax of skateboarding’s 2022 awards season, in which around a half hour of bar-raising video footage has been published to digital internet players over the course of a handful of days — stretching the limits of what seems possible and sometimes leaving the viewer to do little else but laugh at the absurdity of a nollie backside heelflip backside lipslide down a 12-stair handrail as a set-up trick, or popping a frontside noseblunt up the NY pyramid ledges. 

Between Nyjah Huston’s 12 minutes of handrail and hubba obliteration — including three tricks at Clipper in the same session involving switch or nollie heelflips in — and Tyshawn Jones rifling off a succession of back-to-back flip tricks over garbage bins higher than some pros could even ollie, not to mention the kickflip over the subway tracks, the skateboard media consumer can be allowed a bloated feeling of overwhelm. In between all this, Tristan Funkhouser smoked SF again and Louie Lopez still looms. Somewheres, kids are staring at their boards, feeling mildly bludgeoned and wondering if something is drawing to an end, and you feel for the Thrasher brain trust having to sort through it all and make a ruling. 

In past epochs, progression has come and gone in great waves, oriented as much around sub-disciplines as anything else. Christian Hosoi, Tony Hawk, Mike McGill, Danny Way, Colin McKay and various other 1980s superheroes pushed the vert medium to a certain threshold before the bottom dropped out of the industry and street skating rose up, hurtling toward a flurry of flip-trick technicalities that crested and fell back even more quickly. Zero, Baker, Flip and others later hoisted the handrail era, which eventually was supplanted by the time of ledge dancing brought on by ‘Fully Flared.’ The outfits changed, and most of the names on the title cards, but they all eventually ran out of steam. 

As the focus shifted over the past decade from the professional class collectively questing after biggest/longest/hardest and toward a more fragmented universe in which specialized practitioners mine their chosen seams, progression in this IG/personal brand era revolves heavily around the individual. Now it is Sean Green and Jeff Carlyle driving forward the hill bomb, your Jamie Foys and Nyjah Hustons on handrails, Mark Suciu and Shane O’Neill and so on for technicalness, and so forth. There are not many persons doing things at the level to which Tyshawn Jones has elevated monstrous pop, or Nyjah Huston’s brain-numbing array of handrail stunts. But individuals get tired. Their bodies break, and sometimes they want to chill. 

Turning the calendar toward a fresh year means the revolving door can admit whomsoever wants to get super gnarly for the next annual cycle, and there can be no doubt that there are garrulous contenders now planning their 2023 campaigns. But after the events of the past week — Nyjah Huston taking the k-grind on the Dylan Rieder rail all the way down through the kink, whatever you call the fakie version of a nollie backside over-crook; Tyshawn Jones 360 flipping gaps that previously had only been ollied, hardflipping a 10-foot-tall bump to bar — it is hard to imagine another go-round, even kind of exhausting. 

Despite the eat-what-you-kill, increasingly productivity-oriented biz of pro skating, would anybody hold it against Nyjah Huston or Tyshawn Jones or Tristan Funkhouser or Louie Lopez or the rest of the fourth-quarter strivers if they kind of relaxed next year? By not lacing T-Funk with a shoe deal, is Vans missing out on making it a four-way SOTY contest with Nike, Adidas and Converse? With Nyjah Huston’s street filming obligations assuming to have been fulfilled for the time being, does his training and narrative-building for the 2024 Summer Games begin in earnest? Is it a coincidence that two of the current epoch’s most intensely skilled skaters also rank among its loudest dressers? After this past week does everybody maybe need a nap?

Tags: apocalypse fatigue now, bug-eyed bloat, death stares, Deepfried, exuberant yelping, hot pants, hubba rocks, Louie Lopez, Need That!, Nike SBoarding, Nike vs Adidas vs Cons, Nyjah Huston, Play Dead, Supreme, that one switch push, Tristan Funkhouser, Tyshawn Jones