9. Chet Childress – “God Save the Label”

Flameboy to the Wet Willy that was Lance Mountain’s Flip video section, Chet Childress’ hard-luck tale of broken teeth and soggy pinatas teaches us that there’s little love to be found even in a state home to aging hippies and free skateparks built by harmonious units of best friends. Here we find Childress zipping switch-stance through Burnside’s humps and bumps and crunching coping, but the part also functions as a comment on video production at the height of the Great Recession, keeping the filming trips to a cross-town minimum and saving pennies that wealthier companies might have spent on a color picture. All’s we’re saying is if you’re likely to do most of your business in concrete parks anyway there’s less photogenic locales you could select, and the bent-arm bro’s coping-pop remains at an all-time high.

Rushing Elephants

The psychedelic Walt Disney reference so nice we used it… again

There was, and probably still is, a certain breed of skateboarder that works second-shift assembly line jobs, gets evicted from cheap apartments, and remain a crucial part of the skating DNA as far as flying the “office job never” flag. Whether or not this demographic still exists, future “buy a vowel” T-Eddy contender Ben Skrzypek totally looks the part in “God Save the Label,” whilst generally skating much faster than you’d expect, with some validity to the Rob Welsh comparison on several of these ride-aways (like the fakie flip b/s nosegrind), and it’s good to see a dude on the make who’s not caught up in the outfit wars. We are partial to the switch frontside heelflip over the rail, the backside flip over the hydrant, and the cracked ender that looks like it took some balls to ride out.

Whereas Skrzyp6qrxpek rarely shifts from a black tee motif, Adam Alfaro has something like a desert-dweller/GY!BE thing going, in some ways seeming like he’s lightened up for his part in this video: colorful socks and some loopy spots with a comparatively bouncy song and those effortless kickflips. The carve-around ditch kicker thing looks like a snowboard spot, and pretty fun. But if you’re short on spots, or buy into Chet Childress’s story about a bad recession ruining his scheme to frontside grind the Taj Mahal, you could do worse than film a one-spot video part at the ever-mutating Burnside, and the harebrained hillbilly is probably among the better-suited types to pull such a thing off. He’s adopted Portland as a hometown of sorts now, and while he could possibly claim Canada after pushing a Wu-Tang sample for his song, the Label benefits from the thematic push forward I think. The part’s full of trademark Chetisms such as the bluntslide pop-out, the 5-0 revert, an eyebrow-raising switch drop-in and some weird disaster sorta stuff.