Dakota Servold Made A Whole Transworld Video By Himself

It requires a certain steeliness of nerve, a never-look-down style of confidence, to trundle off to market in this bold Year of the Capybara with a wagonload of minimal suede uppers and vulcan soles, seeking purchase and fingerholds upon shoe walls heavy-laden with stay-puft ’90s boots and eBay-ready $150 MSRP limited editions. Just so, Sole Tech’s Emerica this week shows itself to be similarly unshook to point the stalwart footwear concern’s perennially green-tinted lens 180 degrees away from the prevailing stand-and-zoom, face-shoes-face treatment of the modern patterned pants wearers and curb bashers, uploading ‘There’s So Much More,’ a super heavy solo part from tentpole teamrider Dakota Servold, stretched to a feature-length 10 minute runtime.

Here, the feature in question calls back to a certain high-gloss production freighted with snippets of worldly observations, funded by White Pages-scale advertising revenues and coated in creamy atmospherics and b-roll. Whereas energetic beverage conglomerate Red Bull GmbH five years ago conjured the Transworld video spirit for its handrail-drizzled ‘U Good?’, its slow-mo and trip-hop accoutrements lacked much in the way of verbal introspection by the likes of Jamie Foy and Alex Midler. Matt Gotwig generated a fine approximation with his 2021 ‘Birds’ part that came complete with Atiba Jefferson bleep-bloop credits music supervision, but no voiceover; Neils Bennett’s ‘Heroes/Helden’ last year got closer still, dipping into the soul music archives and recruiting Mike Carroll for a brief voiceover.

 

Dakota Servold’s Emerica vid covers all those bases and more, opening with pontifications on the horizon-wide opportunity of the open road and spots waiting to be discovered, interspersed with various quotables and ending with a Young Jeezy/’Thug Motivation’-adjacent exhortation to “go out there.” Other Transworldisms appear throughout, including copious slow-mo, mixed media, desert wastes, fuzzboxed guitars, sunrays blaring through treebranches, and a quotable title.

 

One benefit of the full-production treatment is that Dakota Servold’s tricks are given lots of room to breathe, with lengthy takes and various angles and little filler, and unlike other multi-song epics such as Marc Johnson in ‘Fully Flared’ or Mark Suciu’s ‘Verso,’ this one doesn’t easily divide into chapters. Dakota Servold rummages pretty deep to pull out some pretty wild clips like the frontside bluntslide all the way through the Robert Frost Middle School kinks, the 50-50 up to frontside bluntslide 180 to switch 50-50 down, or that pole jam out to crooked grind down the rail toward the end.

 

After Mike Carroll in Niels Bennett’s vid last year and the Carhartt WIP one several weeks ago, is the voiceover threatening to once again trend? Has the Transworld video format become its own subgenre at this point? Where did he come up with that frontside 180 to switch 50-50 to fakie frontside boardslide combo? Is that one rebar-made rail destined to end a ‘Grains’ video or maybe a future Matt Andersen/Jake Baldini joint?

The Firmer Flex

The Kelly Blue Books have been opened, the wizened sages consulted. Tyshawn Jones this week issued another shockwave across Instagram.com, taking the form of a from-flat ollie over a Ferrari that a caption conservatively estimated at $5 million, appealingly boned out. “Thanks for trusting me,” he typed to the car’s owner, streaming-and-Shazam-numbers-talking mogul Steven Victor, resulting in disbelief and disbelief-expressing emojis from the likes of Swizz Beats and Slim Thug. 

Bereft of written-down rules and placing premiums on creativity and trailblazing, skating’s chattering class was left to weigh the $5 million car jump against automobile ollies of summers past, and certain other memories made. Brooklyn Projects held up a prior Ferrari hop by underground pop magician Xavier Alford, who also had ollied a Mazda Miata. Spinning back the clock further requires examining Jeremy Wray backside heelflipping an Austin-Healy, noted Lexus pilot Tony Hawk also jumping a Lexus, Andrew Reynolds jumping a Piss-drunx packed car, Jeremy Klein’s Hook-Ups van dalliances, Natas Kaupas railsliding the truck, and the Donger, who for a period of time seemed as though he couldn’t stop ollieing cars. Wade Speyer and his dump truck have been discussed previously.

The drama in Tyshawn Jones’ trick derives directly from the potential for expensive harm to befall the quietly parked and shiny Ferrari. Cars and trucks and other wheeled vehicles can and must be valued based upon their mileage, scarcity, brand-name ‘clout’ and the raw materials or rare earths that can be reclaimed from their nonfunctional husks in a post-apocalyptic USA. For a points-and-score-free pursuit such as skating, measuring tricks in terms of the monetary value of what is at stake opens up a more quantitative approach to answering that centuries-old question, ‘who’s getting gnarly?’

Several kilometers away in Richmond VA, home of the fightin’ Flying Squirrels, Jon Rowe is getting gnarly. And the tape-trading shower curtain manufacturers Quasi are in the Jon Rowe business. In a video section for the company’s ‘Stimulation’ release over the past week, Jon Rowe’s deeply celebrated professional bow can be judged on many merits — the burlitude of his k-grinds, the powerful huff of diesel fuel that seems to waft off the recommended big-screen presentation, the deep cuts in his mixed-media shoe game that range from fire-engine red Rees to Air Jordans to Airwalk Enigmas. 

The Airwalk Engima has been correctly regarded in time as the apex of the ’80s/’90s shoe heavyweight’s design acumen, and its tan-and-green-and-black color scheme still rings bells, influencing various Nike Dunks, New Balances, and DC Lukodas over the course of recent presidential administrations. Whereas Tyshawn Jones’ flight over the luxury sports-car thrills at the prospect of an errant axle carving a jagged stripe into the paint, Jon Rowe is taking a finite piece of history and applying griptape at speed, the HD video camera identifying the heavy wear already endured by these once and future deadstock gems. 

Does the destruction of one or several pairs of increasingly rare Engimas make Jon Rowe’s ‘Stimulation’ clips the most valuable released this week, or is this impossible to accurately calculate if Engimas are at this point considered ‘priceless’ antiquities? Is this how come they don’t got a StockX entry? Should the at-risk value of any sports-car ollie off flat consider mainly the paneling and accessories directly threatened by the trick, and would it need to be turned the long way to capture the entire MSRP? Who’s skated the most expensive building?