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.

The Pit and the Pendulum

Stick it

Belatedly wrapping up our rundown of the Black Label video, a topic that has spanned two months here, by looking back to the imperatively titled TWS production “Let’s Do This!” and specifically, Brian Brown’s part: at the time, watching this section tended to challenge the viewer to keep track of the tricks, as nearly every clip was a sequence event incorporating a wallie, wallride, manual or some other shit. Chris Troy, a professional skateboarder to the Label as of last week, is a similar breed, having apparently never met a 360 or 360 shove-it he didn’t like and seeking to incorporate these into damn near every trick he does. It’s a lot to take in, and there are times when he pulls it off super impressively – the fakie bigspin feeble grind is a ballsy move for sure, though maybe not in the same league as skating to a brand-new Rancid song. Other times though it’s nice to see him do a sort of more simple trick, for instance, the crooked grind backside 180 at the Kellen James ledge, a breath of fresh air amongst the bigspins to boardslides to whirlybirds.

Shuriken Shannon tilts things in the other direction, kicking off his last-part performance with two ollies, on flat, in a line. In a couple different ways this dude is helping shift Black Label’s overall aesthetic but he’s doing it via a Lewis Marnell type of solid/frill-free skating (lime grip and occasional ledge combos aside) that gets over mostly on mashing those four little urethane circles to the ground all at the same time in a fairly satisfying way. There are techy moves, like the fakie inward heelflip and the hardflip thing over the rail, but stuff like the 50-50 kickflip, switch frontside 5-0 and backside heelflip are more the rule, and you could put the ender-ender into this category too – that spot I really like for the purposes of video clips, because it’s naturally occurring, appears kind of scary and tricks look good going down it, especially if people land switch and have to carve it out.

In other vids you’d have to wonder whether our friend the throwing star has the fireworks necessary to close out a feature-length production but one of the things “GSTL” has going for it, like Black Label generally, is the panoply of styles/terrains/archetypes as opposed to six or seven parts of stretch-denimed greasers all taking aim at handrails, or tall-teed technicians rotating in and out of New Era fits. Lucero’s institutional expertise and general viewpoint remain as necessary as they’ve ever been (insert comment re: this day/age here), they make good videos, and have aged well as the glam rock wave crested earlier this decade… to whatever extent they owned some of that real estate before the Baker Boys/Hollywood/Pigwood community moved in, and they’re doing a nice job keeping up the neighborhood.

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.

Veni Diddy Vici

Render unto John Lucero…

Haven’t heard a great deal of buzz over the new Black Label video, which debuted a few weeks back, something that could be chalked up to people being busy tearing up obsolete Berrics brackets, downloading any of the other 40 videos that came out this summer, or still watching “Debacle” which is high in this blog’s personal running for top five vids of the year (maybe). Whatever the case the venerable Black Label spirit is very much intact through this new production, despite parting ways with half the team; scraggly speedster Vince Del Valle I had heard of, and mainly associated with that one Adidas ad where he’s doing a backside tailslide shove-it on a ledge above a set of stairs – it made a more interesting ad than usual because they’d gone with the still shot instead of the sequence, well-timed with the shove-it halfway to his feet, which probably incited a few arguments amongst the current crop of driveway kickflippers as to what trick it was supposed to be really.

When Vince Del Valle popped up as the first elephant on parade in “God Save the Label” I was hoping to see how it turned out, since that maneuver wasn’t in his “Diagonal” clip… alas, not. But there’s plenty of chicken-fried flavor to this part, which includes tricks over pieces of trash and a proper 90’s-style switch` hardflip into a ditch – on a related topic VDV also packs one of the more classical 360 flips in a world gone mad with Brian Boitano flare-foot.  Also nice: the underpass escalator backside lipslide, pictured above, the tailslide to regular on a rail, cruise control on the multicolored bank and the horns chiming in for the helicopter ender.