During the 1970s, the Dogtown and Z-Boys skaters of Southern California created an inspired rebellion through their appropriation of Southern California suburbia. Youth unemployment was rife during this period due to the oil crisis (Chlorine, 2003) and there were many youths with spare time on their hands. The drought of the 1970s had caused many of the pools to be emptied and this offered bored youths some fun as well as a way to pass time through the activity of pool skating. This act was highly rebellious in nature as it meant trespassing on private property in order to ensure the ultimate thrill, riding the concrete wave. Skateboarders were appropriating the suburbia that surrounded them, as Gelder identified; “their refusal of the banalities of ordinary life” (2007, piii), meant that suburbia became a playground for the disenfranchised and bored youth. The once mundane suburban streets became utilised through the tactics of appropriation, colonization, and identity formation [that] helped skaters to redefine the city and themselves. By making a different edit of the urban realm from alternative locations and times, skateboarders transformed the sedately suburban character of Los Angeles into dramatic concrete
constructions, exploited under an air of espionage” (Borden, 2001, p53).
The Dogtown and Z-Boys skaters transformed these spaces and made them into their own. Mike Muir’s older brother Jim, was a member of the Dogtown skateboarders and therefore Mike grew up surrounded by this innovation and rebellion. “Possessed to Skate” distinctly portrays the Southern Californian middle class suburbia that the skate punks were rebelling against. The single family homes, neatly assembled on palm tree fringed streets, impeccable lawns and presentation. There is no sign of human interaction, the result of the rise of an anti-pedestrian suburbia where shopping malls and fast-food chains are the only form of entertainment for the disillusioned youth (Butz, 2012, p199).
Ensminger (2012, p113) describes the importance of the “Possessed to Skate” music video in portraying the context of youth disillusionment with society during this period. The subcultures of skateboarding and punk converged in “Possessed to Skate” to convey: “Perhaps the greatest visual trope of skate and destroy…[the] Suicidal Tendencies 1987 video featured countercultural icon Timothy Leary as a clueless, vacationing parent who leaves his young frustrated son to dream and lay waste to the house with a handful of “intruders” – shredders, vatos, and swimsuit-clad women – who proceed to break tables, overturn couches, spray-paint walls, and drain the pool for skating in a mayhem-tinged sequence in synch with the lyrics: “Used to be just like you and me/Now he’s an outcast of society/ Beware he’s possessed to skate!””
The appropriation of the suburban spaces and the middle class suburban home by the band and the skaters display the notion of “relational aesthetics” in which the surroundings are occupied in a manner that focus upon the “realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space” (Tompkins, 2009, p73). This was an assertion against the isolating anti-pedestrianism that had overcome postmodern life. The combination of the activities of skate and punk create a perfect expose of the “possibilities of ruining, remaking, and subverting spaces of everyday suburban existence, [and] became legendary archetypes within pop culture.” (Ensminger, 2011, p113)
Representations of ethnicity – a statement against the dominance and conservatism of white middle class America
Many of the skate punks in Southern California had (often subconsciously) held onto the vestiges of “otherness” from the 1960s. Whilst proclaiming to be alternative to mainstream society, otherness included colluding with marginalised groups within their society, such as the Latinos. As evidenced in both music videos, the band Suicidal Tendencies, even though considered part of the mostly white hardcore punk movement that skate punk morphed from, had members that were Latino, Black and White. This was most likely a result of their socio-demographic locality, as Ensminger explains, Zephyr kids became “punkified due to their circumstances of growing up in intense, culturally diverse places like Dogtown – an amalgam of Ocean Park, Venice and south Santa Monica” (2011, p107).
Mike Muir also explains in his interview with Thrasher in 1987 that, “When we first started playing shows outside of the general Venice area we really stuck out. We’re talking where there’s mostly white people at the punk rock thing…” (Fo, p58) Most literature on skate punk (Chivers-Yochim, Butz) attests that it was a perpetuation of white masculinity, however, Suicidal Tendencies and other skate punk bands such as JFA and Steve Cabellero’s Youth Faction (Caballero was of Latino origin), all had members of differing ethnic backgrounds. White men still “ranked significantly higher on practically every imaginable desirable socioeconomic indicator (Williams, 2003, p189), but to draw attention away from this, Reagan “gave voice and popularity to the myth of white male victimization” (Livingston, 2011, p265). This varying ethnicity within the band, Suicidal Tendencies, was also another way of distancing themselves from the Reaganomic hegemony of white middle class suburbia that Suicidal Tendencies so vehemently disliked.
Dale Maharidge asserts in his book, The Coming White Minority – California, Multiculturalism, and America’s Future (1999, p4) that, “Between 1900 and 1970 California’s white population dropped from 90 percent to 78 percent of the total. But by 1980 the percentage of whites dropped as much as it had in the century’s first seven decades. Between 1980 and 1990 it plummeted another 10 percent… This meant that this multi-culturalism was challenging the Southern Californian white middle class suburban way of life. Suicidal Tendencies looked very much like Latinos in their appearance, with the bandanas, khakis and Levi jeans, and Muir enjoyed pushing the boundaries of identification by presenting himself and the rest of the band in this manner, in the pursuance of individuality and authenticity.
REFERENCES
Borden, I (2001) Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the
Body, Berg: Oxford
Butz K. (2012) Grinding California: Culture and Corporeality in American
Skate punk, Transaction Publishers: New Jersey
Chlorine – A Pool Skating Documentary (2003), Dir. Milan Spasic
Ensminger, David. (2010) A Visual Vitriol – The Street Art and Subcultures of
the Punk and Hardcore Generation, University Press of
Mississippi/Jackson:USA
Fo. M (1987) “Mike Muir”, Thrasher, May 1987, pp56-63 (Accessed 20 September 2013)
Gelder, K. (2007) Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice, Routledge: New York
Livingston, J. (2011) “The Crisis of “A Man’s Man”: Neoliberal ideology in Continental Drift”, The Journal of American Culture, Vol 34. No. 3, September 2011 (Accessed 30 August 2013)
Maharidge, D. (1999) The Coming White Minority – California, Multiculturalism, and America’s Future, Vintage Books: New York
Tompkins, Pilar. (2009) “Vexing: Female Voices from East L.A. Punk – Ways of Living and Models of Action”, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 42: 1, 71-78, Routledge; London (Accessed 20 March 2013)
[This is an excerpt from my Bachelor of Arts (Sociology) Honours Thesis, submitted to the University of Wollongong Arts Faculty in 2013. I am publishing excerpts from this thesis in multiple posts. The thesis aimed to explore the youth subculture of skate punk, how its expression perpetuated authenticity through the aesthetic form of the music video, and how this was reflexive of society at a deeper social level].
[copyright 2023]