Marc Johnson and the Increasing Lameness of the Skateboard Industry

Yes, I'm going to talk about Marc Johnson's move from Lakai to Adidas. I know every other skateboarding blogger has already talked about it, and I know people are either already bummed about it or just don't see what the problem is. But I'm going to use what Marc Johnson did as  jumping off point to talk about a much bigger topic, and that topic is really more of an exploration of this question: Does anyone really like the direction skateboarding (its industry, media, and culture) is going?

For starters, let's recap what we know about Marc Johnson's move to Adidas. Adidas recently put out Away Days, a full length skate video. At the premiere, they announced that Daewon Song and Marc Johnson were joining the team.

For Daewon, the move was somewhat expected. Marc, on the other hand, stirred some people up, because back in 2013, he said in an an interview with Jenkem that he would not do that sort of thing. Literally. Here's the quote:

"If a big sports shoe brand paid you 2 or 3 times your current salary, would you consider leaving Lakai to ride for them?

Okay. No, I wouldn’t ride for a mainstream sports footwear brand. I would not skate for Big Company Footwear."

Tyler Bledsoe's Back!

I don't know how I missed this- apparently I'm 3 months late, but Tyler Bledsoe now rides for HUF. I'll admit, I've been busy with other things for the last 6 months, so I didn't catch it, but Tyler Bledsoe's amazing and I'm happy to see him hooked up with a shoe sponsor since he was dropped from Etnies last year. Here's the intro clip:



Bledsoe is of course also on one of the Alien Workshop offshoots, Quasi Skateboards. This gives me the opportunity to quickly talk about Quasi- I'm pretty excited about Quasi. It took a while for them to fully develop their image, but they basically took 3 of my favorite skaters from Alien (Bledsoe, Gilbert Crockett, and Jake Johnson) and paired that up with amazing board graphics. Check 'em out.

If you're not sold yet on how rad Tyler Bledsoe is, check out this clip that contains all of his footage from  Fourstar's Fully Tour'd. Style for days, this guy:

I Finally Figured Why Chris Chann Bothers Me

Quite a while ago, I watched this video, and it bothered me. I couldn't put my finger on why it bothered me, but the whole thing was very uncomfortable.


I thought maybe I was just off-put by how short the match was. After all, Chris won with just 7 tricks in a contest where it's not unusual to see pros volley 10 tricks back and forth before someone gets a letter. Maybe it's all in my head.

After I rewatched it though, I realized that I was actually just uncomfortable because of how little I related to Chris Chann. Let me explain:

Why Haven't I Seen This?- 27

There's tons of good skate footage out there. I just want to share something that's good that you maybe haven't seen before to get you stoked on skating.

This week's feature is longer than usual, as it's a full video. It's not really broken up into parts, so it made sense to post the full video. It's a work of art and it speaks for itself. If you have a half an hour to kill, I recommend relaxing and enjoying this video.

Why Haven't I Seen This? -26

There's tons of good skate footage out there. I just want to share something that's good that you maybe haven't seen before to get you stoked on skating.


This will be the last part I'm presenting from the Brainsworld series, and it appropriately ends with the last part. Kea Smith is just a really talented skateboarder, plain and simple. I'll let the skating speak for itself.

Why Haven't I Seen This?- 25

There's tons of good skate footage out there. I just want to share something that's good that you maybe haven't seen before to get you stoked on skating.

So for the next few weeks, I'm going to be featuring clips from a great video that I stumbled upon titled Brainsworld. A lot of the spots in the video are also featured in the A Happy Medium series, which makes me think that these guys are from Arizona, although they're a bit younger than the Happy Medium crew.

John O'Neal opened up this video with a solid part. He's got a mean front blunt and the ender looks scary as hell. Take a look.

An Overview of "Sour Solution"

So apparently all the key guys from the European Sweet Skateboards jumped ship late last year to start their own brand, Sour. I'm not sure why they all decided to leave, but you don't usually see that if the team is generally okay with where they are. Whatever the story behind that might be, they started their own brand and came out with The Sour Solution back in January. In the last week, the full video showed up on the web. I don't really care to 'review' the video other than to say I really liked it, but I think it might be fun to go through most of the parts to bring out some highlights.

Starting things off, we have a pretty entertaining bail section starring Simon Isaksson. At 1:45, there's a really cool trick where Simon does a Bennett grind where he grinds on the OTHÉR side of the ledge and then scares the hell out of a pedestrian, which makes it a line as far as I'm concerned. At 3:10 he starts a line by doing a slappy bluntslide (second one in this video part, mind you) and then ducks under a rail mid-slide. It's awesome.