Fear of the ABDs
It doesn’t happen all that often, but every now and then you come across something outside of skateboarding that actually sort of applies to something inside of skateboarding. Today’s example: Vemödalen, which, according to the The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows on YouTube is “The fear that everything has already been done.”
“Dude!” I said to my computer when I stumbled on it, “I can relate. What can anybody do on the board that hasn’t already been done a million times?” The best example of this in my opinion is pretty much every trick people are doing in bowls these days, especially considering all the hype around what they’re doing. But hold on, for the haters who’ll call me out for being a hater let me temper my response with this: What people are doing in bowls is amazing and I love it, but very very little of it is really all that new. Frontside invert disaster? Frazier did it in ’89. Backside boneless up into an Andrecht? Grigley nailed that one in ’86. And that tweaked out Lien air thing you just learned? It’s called a cross bone and Chris Miller was blasting them in ’87. So what’s left?
Neil Blender, Frontside invert 1987. Photo by Mark Waters / skatepunk.com
Regardless of exactly how much of what’s being done is or isn’t an ABD, my general point has the support of skateboarding’s most famously outspoken historian, Jeff Grosso. “There’s a half serious half joke about it,” he told me earlier this year in an interview. “I’ve seen better skateboarding in 1985. But whatever, that was 1985 and this is 2014 and it’s their world. That’s the beauty of skateboarding, you get your skateboard and you walk out the door and it’s you and it’s what you make of it. If that means you’re going to reinvent the past then fucking go for it, reinvent the past, make it your own.”
The YouTube video that illustrates the Vemödalen concept, although overly dramatic and a little too long, does the job of showing how even our best attempts to be unique have almost all been done, without fail. Again and again. But whether we call it an ABD, an imitation, a knockoff, a parody, a counterfeit, mimicry, or like Grosso, a reinvention of the past, the question is what are we going to do about it?
Ronnie Sandoval, present day Frontside invert. Of course it’s an ABD, but the subtle difference of the Sandoval style makes it a true original.
The answer: Kick a foot off of an old trick, tweak it the other way, grab behind the foot instead of in front of it, 180 out, or do whatever it is you’re doing with a unique twist, because if the theory of Vemödalen is a valid, we’d better get in some NBDs because “If, in the end, we find ourselves with nothing left to say, nothing new to add, idly tracing outlines left by others long ago, it will be as if we weren’t here at all.”
Yikes.
- Paul Zitzer
