Matt Militano Has Returned To Us

Fear of the sophomore slump, the one-down, the ill-favoured return trip to the buffet only to find the macaroni and cheese is now only a hollowed-out ruin of crusted detritus — the trepidation of the sequel is not only that the bad guy has come back, or that some irksome and overlooked part of the quest remains unfulfilled. It is that the second time around may never measure up to the first, and worse than that, threatens to diminish the original legacy in the process. It has been scientifically demonstrated that ‘tha Simpsons,’ once heralded as the greatest TV show evar, has now been bad for a period of time multiples greater than when it was good. 

‘Veil,’ the new Philly vid from Zach Sayles, faces the formidable prospect of measuring up to his 2019 release ‘Vanish,’ a great vid with a god-level curtains part from longtime East Coast underdog Matt Militano, whose lackadaisical lank, intricate flippancies and bent imagination captured internet accolades and a position on the 5Boro team, while inspiring spiritual pilgrimages to various cellar doors positioned nearby to plausibly hittable windowsills. Beloved was the video part, and Matt Militano’s continued under-the-radarness since, chosen or not, only bolstered the legend. 

Now it is the year 2023, and much that had been is no longer. Self-taught computers masquerade as chart-topping club crooners, Super Mario is the year’s most powerfully grossing film star, and in the wilds of Colombia, wetlands boil with the husky and illicit offspring of Pablo Escobar’s hippo collection.

And yet, even in the midst of all these unfamiliars and turmoily change, there can be no doubt that Matt Militano and Zach Sayles have come through, meeting and perhaps surpassing the lofty bar set all those years ago in 2,019. Starting with a switch Ellington shove-out the hard way and proceeding from there, Matt Militano in ‘Veil’ rummages deeply through his bag across two glove-snug tunes, draping wallrides and nose manuals across new corners of PA crust. Jewels are dispensed generously, like a pretzeling backside 180 nosegrind nose manual, a deeply pleasing backside nosegrind to switch 5-0, a leveled-up backside noseblunt on the multi-coloured step-up block at the Puerto Rico school. There is a velveteen set-up nollie, a resplendent saxophone solo, and a centerpiece after-dark line through the Muni plaza that is almost comical in its spotless execution and rumbling drama. 

‘Veil’ holds many other riches, ranging from Wu-powered section from Jersey luminary Devon Connell, Quel Haddox flipping his way down steps and over brick and across a street gap, a cyclone of a trick from Neil Herrick involving two backside 180s plus a wallride and a switch manual,Anatoly Bitny doing the scariest-looking switch ollie in quite some time, and a clip from Sergei Trudnowski. Physical DVDs can be bought here.

Last One, I Promise, I Hope, Sort Of

Not that he didn’t deserve it, but the August 2009 TSM kiss-off from Dave Swift to skateboarding’s confused, painful, wonderous mess of a Jereme Rogers*, now rap music’s confused painful mess of a JR, to me falls into the day late/dollar short category. Swift’s point stands, of course — the whole idea behind a magazine is to hold good skate-boarding to the light and enjoy its stoke-a-riffic sparkle — but if you want to get serious about it, lil Jereme’s nonsense has been occupying precious space in the grand pages of our world for some time now, and the best magazines also mark the cultural milestones along the way, so why not a bookend to this absurd and glorious journey that Jereme Rogers has taken us on for the last seven years? As Swift himself notes, Bucky’s pool will be there forever and ever, but I would personally like to take these particular blog characters to urge each and every budding collector type to buy a copy of this magazine… imagine if Chris Gentry had penned a retirement letter announcing his own rap music pursuits, or Bastien Salabanzi, chasing blues-guitar dreams. JR’s “retirement” is the latest tattooed milemarker to these strange times in which we travel.

To get the full read on where JR is coming from, you really do have to listen to the meandering, eight-minute suite “Goodbye Skateboarding,” the ender-ender on his new “This Shouldn’t Be a Mixtape, Mixtape” mixtape; you can download it for free, as he was telling his friends Puff Daddy and Dwayne Carter on Tweeter just yesterday. A more succinct version, no doubt riddled with spelling errors and text-message abbreviations, will run in the Skateboard Mag August issue, where Jereme Rogers lays out his case: a child prodigy Little League pitcher, he gave it all up to become a regional tween gymnastics champion**, which he threw away to live on the cold streets of Boston as a 13-year-old skateboard phenom grinding to make a place for himself in this cold cold world. Also Eli Reed was there, according to the song.

The point is that JR understands you need to have some skin in the game, so he’s going all-in to pursue his new passion, and since nearly everyone was wondering, his friends and/or associates did indeed try and warn him multiple times that this might be a fantastically poor idea. But, JR deflects doubts with hater-proof armor and is willing to go back to couch-surfing to make PMP music a reality.

And yet if I were to lay a bet with Dave Swift, it would be that JR will be back on the pages of TSM within three years shaping his comeback to skating, with any combination of illegal file-sharing, nefarious business partners and general haterism to blame for the untimely demise of PMP music. In the meantime I feel like we’ve struck the ultimate deal, since we get to observe JR, the tattoo-collecting, no-man-fearing, whisper-rapping spectacle, without having to sacrifice valuable magazine space and video footage to further safety-arm landings. Plus we have all those fond memories to look back on. Remember when Koston and those dudes stole his plane ticket and he giggled about having to ride a train across Europe, flatground kickflipping all the way there? Also, this:

Best of luck in the rap game Jereme! Your friends at Boil the Ocean

*Apologies to the Gryffon
**Hopefully young JR doesn’t run afoul of Jay-Z and become the next contestant on that summer jam screen