Summertime Mixtape #4: Kenny Hughes “Third Eye View”

“Work” is the low-hanging fruit of the Gangstarr catalogue for the purposes of video part soundtracks, or if you like, the unawares and poorly defended coastal town rich with grains and tradable goods to be pillaged. If “Work” came out in the Youtube age there would be a half-dozen edits soundtracked to it within a fortnight. It takes a more discerning mind to have predicted the tectonic shifts of industry trends and ‘outboard hype’ such that Kenny Hughes doing a melon grab above the coping on a mini ramp for an Emerica ad, my own personal first recollection of his skating, would potentially be a realistic ad to see run in the current environment ad cycle some 15 years later. Kenny Hughes is here skating in sweated up T-shirts, 360 flipping across schoolyards and putting the pressure to crooked grinds generally. And, that nollie f/s heelflip. Kenny Hughes for better or for worse was an Element careerist, and you may be tempted to call the brand’s bottom around the time of his exit. Does he get more respect or less for riding for Element as long as he did? I would argue, more.

1990s Antique Roadshow (sort of): Emerica “Klink” Ad

It would be mighty nice if more companies did ad archives – it saves valuable Tampa vert video clip-watching time sifting through boxes of old magazines and helps the chronologically challenged, such as myself. A good deal of skateboard culture, such as it is, can be wrung from the yellowing pages of TWS and Thrashers, as internet websites more capable than this one point out on a daily basis. And in these times of harsh economy, if you’re one of these vaguely remitted “brand managers” wouldn’t you be jumping at the chance to circulate already paid-for advertising among untold billions of glazed-over internet eyeballs?

Anyhow as an addendum to this recent series of memory lane barrel-scraping entries, I found myself clicking through Emerica’s pretty extensive ad archive the other day and eventually went on a hunt for what must’ve been my first pair of their shoes, the Klink, pictured above. Except in dark blue. I gravitated toward them in large part cuz of the strap on the back, a feature that was key to myself and others in the days that jeans were worn loose and long. It’s funny, I recall these shoes as pretty by-the-numbers basic mid-90s fare but revisiting the ad, the wavy stitching patterns kinda threw me for a loop. I suppose though this was around the time when DC was affecting a shift towards the “sportier” designs that would later lure Emerica’s thruster-air busting Kenny Hughes with the allure of Euro Supertours yet to come.

And if I had to guess, at the time I probably would’ve put some long odds on Chris Senn hanging on longest out of the team bros listed off in the lower left.