Tag: zines

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Joseph Rathgeber: anticon and Beyond

anticon was a time, a team, a blip on a screen, 
       a group, a label, a stable of men.
anticon was a movement, a moment, an underground scene,
       a business, a base, a stance against the status quo.

anticon was a voice, a mic, a 4-track backing track,
        a collective, a corrective, a fix for the pre-millennium tension.
anticon was a concept, a conspiracy, a crew on a mission,
       a shout, a scream, a call out to listen

anticon was a scam, a hoax, a marketing plan destined to fail,
        a process, a project, a product for sale.
anticon was a wave, a wormhole, a wish for acceptance.
        a way forward, a way out, a way away from the present tense.
The bottle of humans that was anticon: doseone, Yoni Wolf, Controller 7, Sole, DJ Mayonaise, Odd Nosdam, Alias, pedestrian, and Jel.

Call them a collective, a crew, or any and all of the above, anticon started with collaborations and compilations from different points on the map (Maine, Cincinnati, Chula Vista, Chicago, and parts unknown), but on the cusp of the new millennium, they got it all together in the grey area of the Bay Area. Now, underground scholar Joseph Rathgeber has compiled their definitive history.

One rapper I talked to called him “a professor of word salad,”1 but Rathgeber’s loosely aphoristic, epigrammatic style wanders somewhere between the manic musings of Dave Tompkins and the futuristic philosophy of Rammellzee. Like me, he matriculated in the zine trade and graduated to books.

Joseph Rathgeber: As a zine press, Caltrops has been actively documenting and analyzing the underground rap renaissance since 2020, disseminating handmade zines direct from the kitchen table to the rest of the world. Catch Us Before We Fall Off inaugurates Caltrops Press as a publisher of hip-hop books.2

From 1,200 Hobos to 1,200 pages: The definitive history of anticon (Caltrops Press, 2026)

Rathgeber’s Caltrops zines have been a steady wealth of in-depth analysis of some of the most obtuse recent releases by some of the most complex and compelling underground artists of the decade: billy woods, ELUCID, Fatboi Sharif, Armand Hammer, and ShrapKnel, among others. Yo, kid kinda nice.

doseone: Joe [Rathgeber] is part person, part pen. Someone who grows because of other’s writing and grows wilder still within his own. It’s an honor to have our creativities intertwine…3

One could estimate the impetus of anticon’s beginnings in the game, but like some lo-fi, hip-hop, jazz version of Genesis or The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, Apogee (doseone, Yoni Wolf, Josiah Wolf, and Mr. Dibbs) represents the direct precursor to anticon’s most known and most creative period. They recorded everything and yet the only tape one might find is a bootleg, a testament to the sporadic and ephemeral nature of the hydra-headed genius(es) at work here. Their improvised, theatrical rehearsals and performances—decidedly interchangeable designations—collected the scraps of previous projects and composed the compost from which grew others. The later assemblies of different members included Deep Puddle Dynamics (doseone, Sole, and Alias, as well as Slug of Atmosphere and Rhymesayers Entertainment; another candidate for the coalescence of the collective), Themselves, cLOUDDEAD (another one), Why?, subtle, Reaching Quiet, So-Called Artists, Greenthink, and so on—row, row, row, rotating rosters. It was all a beautiful mess at best, a catalog of risks, “some careless, some calculated,”4 with pregnant promises of vision and never getting paint on spectacles again.5

“My dream would be to see a movie of just live studio footage of some of my favorite records being made with no commentary or anything, just a good behind-the-scenes look — all the arguments and the epiphanies.”6
— Yoni Wolf

Rathgeber has ingested that mess, investigated that dream, and interrogated those responsible—all of it and all of them, which resulted in a 1,200-page, two-volume mega-tome. Part prose-poetic pastiche, part oral history, Catch Us Before We Fall Off: A [Ch]oral History of anticon. (Caltrops Press, 2026) is the kind of deep dig you wish someone would do on all of your favorite artists, bands, collectives, labels—an excavation of all the burial sites, an autopsy of all the bodies. For fans of all things anticon, this is the definitive history, “an audacious document of a pivotal moment in hip-hop history.”

Jel: It wasn’t being played on the radio, but it was bumping at the Scribble Jam.7

The lore is true. Scribble Jam is another gravesite in this ruined geography, another node in this invisible network. Starting in 1996 in a parking lot, Scribble Jam hosted and boasted some of the most legendary battles in hip-hop’s short history. Emcees, DJs, beatboxers, and B-boys all battled for underground supremacy. Artists like Juice, Eminem, and Rhymefest, as well as anticon artists like doseone and anticon-adjacent artists like DJ Abilities, Eyedea, and Sage Francis made or built their names exchanging weaponized wordplay and battle-sharpened skills at Scribble Jam’s many hectic melees.

Archived by any means, many of anticon’s early documents were recorded on 4-track tape machines, what Rathgeber, channeling Marshall McLuhan, describes as “medium and message, DIY, unbridled bedroom creativity spinning around magnetic tape spools.”8 I, too, once compared the “primitive and unadorned nature” of anticon’s output to adjacent lo-fi indie-rock outfits hiding behind the same wow and flutter: Guided by Voices, Sebadoh, Hood (the latter of whom would collaborate with members of the collective). In similar spirit, theirs was not an aesthetic choice but a necessary one. With an excess of output from the rhymers-only room, the 4-track bridged the bay between process and product, between the ether and something tangible, between table talk and a cassette tape. The hiss was the ignorance of which bliss is made.

“I tested my chassis on the road and drove faster accordingly.”
— doseone

Dan Hancox: doseone is the label’s most out-there, artful rapper, and his ghostly, nasal rhymes are the centrepiece to the bizarre compositions of Themselves. The distorted drones and drum samples, clunking pipes, feedback and abrupt time signatures of “It’s Them” and “Live Trap” do to hip-hop what Columbus did to world geography. Such experimental creations will not be to everyone’s tastes, but repay repeated listening—with not a gold necklace in sight.9

Alias: Who the hell’s that guy?10

Rathgeber describes doseone’s style as “an invitation to get lost in the funhouse,” an invitation “to be riveted by the skillset, rapt by the rapping,” and adds, “sometimes the mental plane which doseone operates on feels unreachable, his messages utterly abstruse.”11 dose’s style is varied, verbose, sometimes sing-songy, sometimes chanty… It’s shanti, shanti, all over the rap; divisive, polarizing, an affront to all those frontin’ on the mic.

If music fandom is radically subjective, then hip-hop fandom is even more so. I’ve been in many discussions where mentioning anticon was anathema, I’ve been in several situations where admitting to liking them was an irreversible faux pas. To quote Hua Hsu in The Wire, anticon “embodies all the fascinating contradictions which both sustain and complicate the culture.”12 As pedestrian puts it in his Foreword to Catch Us Before We Fall Off, “In the vacuum of crew, molecules of burning gas will as a rule go solo. And so, a posse cuts both ways, loosens into them and you, now uniquely incomplete.” And from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire: “A system of cells interlinked, within cells interlinked, within cells interlinked within one stem. And dreadfully distinct against the dark…”13 Deep lines were drawn, not in sand but hella underground.

Their underground was “twilit tunnels and secret passages”14 from trading tapes to downloading songs, from CDs to mp3s. Their underground saw a seismic shift, the tectonics of an industry in upheaval, where ever-new forms of bootlegs were balms and “clandestine comforts.”15 Their underground was both burden and boon.

Sole: Underground music was tape trades and Napster. The whole groundwork for a market existing for the label came out of widespread sharing of that music.16

anticon was baptized by bandwidth, they stepped from one era to the next over the cataclysm of the internet. Adapting to the new tech as they adopted it, anticon took advantage of the early bit trade. Downloaded on the down low, spreading at the speed of P2P, their music moved from around the way to around the world through wires and wormholes alike.

“It was as if we came home from a semester at sea with nothing to eat but dreams.”
— pedestrian

Rathgeber finally describes the anticon aesthetic as “a fleeting moment in time—rap-as-literature; sonics-and-phonics thoroughly plundered; altruistically allusive and relentlessly referential; an irreverent and foolish yet holy pursuit of art.”17 Maybe it was just “a fleeting moment,” but maybe it was the music. Maybe it was the attitude. Maybe it was the Sole/El-P feud. Maybe it was just too many halfway crooks in their kitchen. Whatever it was and whatever you think of them, they followed their own path accompanied by their own drums. Like the Wu-Tang Clan before them and Odd Future after, anticon came together for a brief period, jumped in the deep puddle, splashed spectacularly, rippled to the edges, and then subsided.

dosone: The whole paper towel was wet with our experiment.18

anticon was a time, a team, a blip on a screen, but if you’re interested in indie discourse and rhymes outside the lines, Rathgeber’s Catch Us Before We Fall Off interjects anticon back into the history, the conversation, the cypher.

.

Joseph Rathgeber. [photo by by Ananda Lima]

Roy Christopher: You and I came to this writing racket making our own zines. Aside from that, what’s your background?

Joseph Rathgeber: My mother recently found my fourth grade report card. My teacher, Ms. Kroll, wrote, “Joseph is doing as little as possible.” That was an accurate assessment. When it’s come to education and employment, I’ve been unmotivated and directionless. Near the end of high school, I had to be reminded to apply to college, and I only worked enough (washing cars) to afford a weekly plate of fries from Six Brothers Diner (R.I.P.). When my parents threatened to kick me out of their home, that Atmosphere lyric that goes “I rather live in a tent than bust my ass to pay the rent” was all the ideology I needed.

Ultimately, I got an English degree from a state school here in New Jersey. Again, no thoughts of a “career” in mind. I was reading poems, plays, and novels anyway, so it made sense to do so in the pursuit of a degree. I also had a concentration in Creative Writing, which just means I took a lot of workshop classes and minimized my workload even further. I found plenty of time to do what I really wanted to do, which was record rap music. I also started writing about music in the form of record reviews for Tiny Mix Tapes. Anyway, with no career options to speak of after college graduation, my girlfriend (now wife) and I decided to pursue the “alternate route” to teacher certification. Basically, you find a teaching job at a Catholic or private school and complete night classes during the first year of employment. That job also paid for me to get a Master’s a couple years later. They didn’t even require it be a Master’s in Education, so of course I went for English. I was encouraged to continue toward a PhD or MFA, but, again, the motivation wasn’t there and neither was the money.

At that point, I was still paying off my student loans from undergrad. When I first started writing about billy woods’ music in 2021, he made some good-natured crack about me being on sabbatical for the semester, and then something about me being the department chair. I like to think of that compliment as my framed PhD diploma. In reality, I teach high school kids how to analyze literature. I also constantly urge them to consider diverging from their predicted life path. It’s noble work.

Various Caltrops zines. [author photo]

RC: Aside from the zines, you’ve written other books in the past. Why a book on anticon and why now?

JR: I’ve been pretty vocal about how this anticon book is a decade in the making, so “why now” feels interminable. When I first conceived the idea, it was because I had great affection for the music that emerged from anticon’s salad days, roughly between 1996 and 2003. I had some thoughts about hip-hop and otherwise that I wanted to explore through them and their work, but at some indeterminate point the vision for the project began to swell. I like to be thorough, and so my vision for the project went from something manageable to monstrous as I decided I had to write about all the music from that period and tell the stories of all the players.

Eventually I decided to have the players tell the tale themselves. Suddenly, I realized I was juggling both an oral history and a critical commentary. The former required that I learn how to make contacts with artists, conduct interviews, and integrate those transcripts into a narrative. Bear in mind I had no real experience to speak of and had to slowly prove my credibility to these people, not to mention earn their trust as I ventured deeper into the project. Ultimately what resulted was an unwieldy conglomeration. The result is Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home biography of Dylan and Michael Gray’s Song & Dance Man analysis of his body of work in one. It’s Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces subcultural commentary and the oral history of Please Kill Me combined.

I’m a fool, frankly, for even attempting this. Nonetheless, I got it done and I feel more than good about it. A more direct answer to “why now?” would be that over this decade of working on the book anticon has been absent from the story. Retrospectives of late ‘90s/early 2000s underground hip-hop include the likes of Fondle ‘Em, Rawkus, Def Jux, SoleSides, Hiero, and others, but anticon has been routinely and, in my view, deliberately omitted. The book examines why that is while inserting them back into that conversation in the process.

RC: How did you get into zine-making in the first place?

JR: Like most, I’ve always appreciated the DIY nature of zines. As I became more and more disillusioned with publishing poetry and fiction through the conventional means and processes, I decided life’s too short to fill out submission forms and wait months or even years for responses, be they rejections or acceptances. That traditional way worked fine for a time, specifically when I was young and seeking validation from institutions and perceived authorities in the field. But zines and chapbooks were more immediate, and the medium matched the urgency of the art.

I will say this: I have received far more validation, praise, and opportunities in the years I’ve been doing things myself and on my own terms. And I’m always going to prize the tangibility of zines, the intimate pasting, folding, stapling, and mailing of an artifact that is transferred to someone else’s hands. Those things will last. Podcast episodes will soon be lost in the ether.

Rathgeber at Gutter Bar. [photo by Suchi Jalavancha]

RC: What’s next for Joseph Rathgeber and Caltrops Press?

JR: Personally, I’m champing at the bit to write fiction again. Between the anticon books and the underground hip-hop renaissance I’ve been documenting over the last six years, I’m very eager to open up the notebook with all the story ideas I’ve had to look away from until these current projects reached a conclusion. I have been writing plenty of poetry over these years, though, so I’m sitting on a couple of manuscripts and trying to figure out what to do with those. I also miss doing public readings.

As for Caltrops Press, the plan is to continue publishing books about hip-hop. The next one will be a book about the work of Armand Hammer and billy woods and ELUCID as solo artists, also written by me. That’s basically done and will come out Spring 2027 if, as DOOM once said, everything goes according to plan, man. I want to open up the press to proposals by other writers, but I’m intimidated by anything “business” related and don’t have the wherewithal to send out 1099s and all that shit, so it’ll have to be people I’m close with first. Caltrops, as a zine, just hit issue 30, and I don’t plan to stop there.

Notes:

  1. Interview with the author, September 15, 2026. ↩︎
  2. Joseph Rathgeber, “Book Release: Catch us Before we Fall Off,” Caltrops Press Substack, September 8, 2026. ↩︎
  3. Interview with the author, September 15, 2026. ↩︎
  4. Joseph Rathgeber, Catch Us Before We Fall Off, Vol. 1, Caltrops Press, 2026, 2. ↩︎
  5. cLOUDDEAD, “I Promise Never to Get Paint on My Glasses Again” [10” EP], Mush Records, 2001. ↩︎
  6. Quoted in Roy Christopher, “Yoni Wolf and Richard Adams: The Sound of a Handshake” (pp. 211-215) in Roy Christopher (ed.), Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes, Seattle, WA: Well-Red Bear, 2007, 214. ↩︎
  7. Quoted in Rathgeber, Vol. 1, 2026. ↩︎
  8. Rathgeber, 2026, Vol. 1, 334. ↩︎
  9. Dan Hancox, “The Download,”  New Statesman, London Vol. 18, Iss. 849, March 7, 2005, 43; The gold-chain thing is a whole other story. ↩︎
  10. Quoted in Rathgeber, Vol. 1, 2026, 555. ↩︎
  11. Rathgeber, Vol. 1, 2026, 100. ↩︎
  12. Hua Hsu, “Anticon: Hip-hop’s Oddball Alliance,” The Wire, #200, October 2000. ↩︎
  13. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, New York: Putnam, 1962, 61. ↩︎
  14. Rathgeber, 2026, Vol. 1, 17. ↩︎
  15. Ibid. ↩︎
  16. Quoted in Rathgeber, Vol. 1, 2026, 567-8. ↩︎
  17. Rathgeber, Catch Us Before We Fall Off, Vol. 2, Caltrops Press, 2026, 496. ↩︎
  18. Quoted in Rathgeber, Vol. 2, 2026, 565. ↩︎

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The Unexplained #8

The eighth issue of “The Unexplained” came out sometime during the summer of 1988. I remember being very proud of this issue. Looking back at it now, I can see the beginnings of the end of the first wave of our little pastime.

The growing tension(s) between the hardcore riders and the event organizers spilled out into the open at the two contests covered herein: NBL events in Rome and Jeckyll Island, Georgia. Call it a generational divide, a youthful restlessness that recognized that “freestyle” contests were kind of silly, or just the cyclical nature of so-called action sports, but it wouldn’t take long for such events to disappear completely.

The-Unexplained-8Download

Anyway, It looks like I’d figured out how to properly fill an issue with stuff. In addition to the BMX contests, there’s local (southeast Alabama) skateboarding coverage, an interview, zine and video reviews (the Plywood Hoods’ underground classic Dorkin’ in York), rumors, and more.

It’s also evident with this issue that I’d learned a bit more about cameras and copy machines. I hope you dig the results.

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Front Wheel Drive #47

This one’s kind of weird as a .pdf. It had two covers, so originally half the zine was oriented one way, then at the centerfold, you’d close it, flip it, and start again from the other side. I scanned it all the right way up though.

FWD47Download

This one’s from sometime in 1997.

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RAD RAG

I present the following with more than a little embarrassment, but history is history and youthful folly has its way with all of us.

One day during the summer after our ninth-grade year, I went over to my friend Matt Bailie’s house to ride bikes and listen to music. There’s nothing unique about that. That’s what we did most days during those summers, but the latest Freestylin’ Magazine had just come out, and inside was a two-age spread on ‘zines.

Opening the magazine to those pages, Matt said, “We could do this.”

So, we did.

Rad Rag, our first attempt, was done on a coin-operated copy machine at a local drug store. I walked up and down the strip mall it was in changing ones for dimes from sympathetic merchants to pay for it. As such, we couldn’t do two-sided copies, so every page is blank on the back (also hence the odd number of pages).

Anyway, here’s where it all started: the first zine we ever made as teenagers.

Rad-RagDownload

More of these as I scan them all for the anthology, Collecting the Kid: Zines, 1986-2026.

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Front Wheel Drive #46

I’ve been slowly, quietly compiling an anthology of my zines, and this was one I didn’t have a copy of myself. Front Wheel Drive #46 was a ten-year anniversary issue of sorts. It came out sometime in 1996, a decade after my first zine in July of 1986.

FWD-46Download

The working title for the anthology is Collecting the Kid: Zines, 1986-2026 (with apologies to El-P), and it includes ‘The Unexplained’, ‘Front Wheel Drive’, and a bunch of one-offs and further failed attempts.

Special thanks to Craig Gates for scanning and sending this issue my way. Many more of these to follow.

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Thoughts That Count

You don’t know the name Angela Britt, but if you were familiar with the deepest details her story—from runaway to ranch hand—you might recognize her as a dozen or so characters in the novels of Cormac McCarthy. She was the model for both the bumbly bum Gene Harrogate and the young and doomed Wanda from Suttree for instance. As I read Vincenzo Barney’s article in Vanity Fair, not only was I surprised that McCarthy didn’t have all of that horse knowledge firsthand—like all of his writing, the bits about ranching are very convincing, rife with expert detail—but also how many times the number 47 kept popping up.

Forty-Seven

I was interested in the story because of how frequently and thoroughly McCarthy had alluded to Britt in so many characters in so many of his novels. I thought the allusions to a living yet unknown person was an interesting angle on the figurative phenomenon. Britt knew McCarthy for 47 years. Coincidentally, she has 47 extant letters from him. McCarthy didn’t send her one letter a year, but she managed to keep the same number of letters.

Sometime last century students at Pamona College in California noticed the number 47 popping up around campus. For one, the college is just off exit 47 of I-10. In her article, “The Mystery of 47,” from the October 1, 2000 issue of Pomona College Magazine, Sarah Dolinar writes,

Depending on your point of view, you might call it a tradition built around trivia, or you might call it Pomona’s link to the deep structure of the universe. For instance, were you aware that the organ case in Lyman Hall has exactly 47 pipes? Or that Pomona’s traditional motto, “Pomona College: Our Tribute to Christian Civilization,” has 47 characters? Did you know that at the time of Pomona’s first graduating class in 1894 there were 47 students enrolled? And if you want to go deeper into the mystery, did you notice that the last two digits in that year equal 47 times two?

Many Pomona alumni have deliberately inserted 47 references into their work. Joe Menosky, class of 1979, a writer for Star Trek: The Next Generation, inserted 47 mentions into nearly every episode of the show. Starting on Star Trek, continuing with Menosky on TNG, and through all of J.J. Abrams’s work (e.g., Alias, Lost, Fringe, the Star Trek reboots, etc.), the number 47 has a long history on the screen. Wherever there’s a stray number in the dialog of one of these shows—a time-stamp, an evidence tag at a crime scene, an apartment number—47 does its numerical duty, threading through and connecting the pieces to a larger whole.

David Lynch’s last feature film, Inland Empire from 2006, partially takes place during the filming of a movie. The movie within the movie is called On High in Blue Tomorrows. After an unnerving disturbance during a table read on set, producer Freddie Howard (Harry Dean Stanton) and director Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons) confess to the two leads — Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) and Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) — that they are shooting a remake of an unfinished German production called Vier Sieben — 47, which was itself based on a cursed Polish folktale. The previous project was abandoned after the two leads were found murdered “inside the story.”

Before that revelation, we are treated to a surrealist sitcom featuring a rabbit family going about their day in their living room. Later on in the movie, after an altercation with a some sort of phantom, Nikki flees into Room 47, which, unbeknownst to her, is the living room of the rabbits from television. These allusions start out unbeknownst, but soon they seem ubiquitous. For instance, after the earth’s human population reached 2 billion people in 1928, it took 47 years for it to reach 4 billion in 1975, and another 47 years to double again in 2023.

Let’s look at another one.

Forty-Three

It started as an amount of change.

Once upon a time in the early 1980s, the father of one of the Curb Dogs—a loose-knit crew of skateboarders and BMXers in the Bay Area scene that included Maurice Meyer, Dave Vanderspek, Marc Babus, and future Bones Brigade member Tommy Guerrero—walked from the local convenience store into a house party with 43 cents jingling in his pocket: a quarter, a dime, a nickel, and 3 pennies. In a wacky accent, he said to those assembled, “How come every time I come home from the store, I always have 43 cents in my pocket?!” Everyone laughed it off, but the idea was incepted.1 For this group of skateboarders and BMXers, the number 43 was suddenly very important, and they started seeing it everywhere.

BMX nostalgia. Illustration by Roy Christopher.

Maurice “Drob” Meyer, the NorCal BMX local some call the Godfather of 43, says it was Rob “Orb” Fladen’s dad who started the 43 phenomenon. In 1986 (which Drob points out is two times 43), a bunch of those NorCal guys visited Wizard Publications in Los Angeles, the home of BMX Action, Freestylin’, and later Homeboy and Go magazines. These publications were our news networks, and they were all helmed by three hyper-creative dudes known as the Master Cluster: Andy Jenkins, Mark Lewman, and Spike Jonze. If skateboarding was a relatively small subculture in the mid-1980s, then BMX freestyle was even smaller. These guys documented it with an energetic blend of wisdom and whimsy that included not only the adjacent action of skateboarding but also street art, underground music, and BMX mythology.

Soon the lore spread, and the numerology followed. Forty-three started showing up in the magazines, zines, and videos. It was known as the coincidence number. We saw it in receipts and change, bank signs and temperatures, longitudes and latitudes, mile markers and measurements. In the late 1980s, skateboard pro-cum-photographer Bryce Kanights had a warehouse ramp in the Bay Area called Studio 43. Ron Wilkerson’s legendary Enchanted Ramp was just off the 5 interstate at exit 43. Though the letters D and C in DC Shoes stand for Droors Clothing, Drob points out that D and C are the fourth and third letters of the alphabet. In Eddie Roman’s 1991 video Headfirst, Mat Hoffman, who is widely considered the Michael Jordan of BMX, mentions the number, exposing a new decade of riders to the cult of 43.

By the early 1990s, the Master Cluster had moved on from BMX, into magazines for young men (Dirt) and the Beastie Boys (Grand Royal). Soon, they moved into other areas entirely. Jenkins went into skateboard art (for Girl and Chocolate Skateboards), Lewman went into advertising (for companies like Lambesis and Nemo Design), and Jonze, as a music video director (for the Beastie Boys, Weezer, Björk, and many others), was already on his way to fame and acclaim in Hollywood. In 1995 they were the subject of a one-page profile in Wired Magazine. The page number? 43.

Have you ever learned a new word and then started seeing it everywhere? This is what the literary theorist Kenneth Burke called “terministic screens.” Burke would say that the word was always there, but you were filtering it out, obscuring it with ignorance. Once it became a part of your terministic screen, only then did you start seeing it. Forty-three is a prime number. As an angel number, 43 is highly positive and gives you hope anything is possible if you believe and pursue it. Says a popular angel number website, “People who regularly see number 43 should trust their own inner voice in all things they do.” Everyone knows you can do this with any number, but when you share that number with a group of like-minded people, the power is undeniable.

“Today, you can see and hear references to 43 in movies by Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, and TV shows by Dave Chapelle,” the flatland BMX professional Dave Nourie writes. In Spike Jonze’s 1999 feature film, Being John Malkovich, Malkovich’s apartment number is 43, a nod to Jonze’s BMX roots. Nourie calls these planted 43s “acts of agriculture,” intentional allusions to an inside joke held by a few practitioners of a niche action sport, but the number has leaked into the larger world. Growing up, the novelist Rachel Kushner ran with Tommy Guerrero and others in the NorCal skateboard and BMX scene. As she writes in her essay, “The Hard Crowd,” “Forty-three was our magic number. I see it and remember that I’m in a cult for life.”

Forty-Two

Everybody knows the meaning of life is 42.

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My “Mining Affordances” piece in the Henry Ford Magazine

I wrote a piece about skateboarding for the Summer/Fall 2024 issue of the Henry Ford Magazine. “Mining Affordances” explores the way that riding a skateboard reshapes one’s relationship with the world, the environment, and oneself.

Many thanks to Kristen Gallerneaux for inviting me to do this piece, as well as Jennifer LaForce, Julie Friedman, and all at Octane Design and the Henry Ford Magazine.

You can flip through the magazine or download the .pdf of my essay.

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An Invisible Intellectual Speakeasy

Chase Griffin recently did an interview with me for Metapsychosis, a journal of consciousness, literature, and art. Chase is the author of What’s on the Menu? (Long Day Press, 2020), the forthcoming Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace (Corona\Samizdat), as well as co-author (with Christina Quay) of How to Play a Necromancer’s Theremin (Maudlin House, 2023), about the latter of which I wrote,

“How do you like your metaphors mixed? This work of psy-fi docutainment, best ingested by first grinding it into Bookpowder, follows Rocco Atleby’s kudzu plots in the pursuit of fluctuation on the horizon of the Patasphere. Flitting and flirting with spacetimeconsciousness dimensionzzzzz, deep down, heinleined under there somewhere, Chase Griffin and Christina Quay have committed some really serious satire. So pack your pestle and mortar and get ripping!”

Thanks to Chase’s insightful questions, he and I cover quite a lot in this short but wide-ranging discussion.

Chase Griffin: Is there a circuit for you between BMXing/skateboarding and media theory? If so, what’s that sparking thing?

Roy Christopher: Well, in the broadest sense, one of my main research interests is the influence of technology on culture. The study of media—and even that in my mind is quite broad—somewhat narrows the research to where the results of this collision play out. I’m focused on the domains of various youth cultures, so BMX and skateboarding media is where bikes, boards, digital cameras, video cameras, writing, riding, music, and the like converge and capture it all. When you watch a video or see a magazine from a certain era, you’re seeing a snapshot of a culture at that time.

So, yes. I started making zines in the summer of 1986. Ten years later, I started messing around with HTML, and I saw the web as another level in zine-making. Though I was still doing print zines, I learned some basic code, bought some domain names, and starting building websites. The blogs (a term I am still hesitant to own) of the 2000s might’ve been the last era during which I felt like my approach to indie discourse thrived. The social-media silos killed all of that.

CG:Is the feedback loop the only way to go? Is this what makes today’s media such an anxiety inducing place? It feels like it’s not just the geopolitics and climate change? The loops, content aside, can be wholly crippling for many. It feels conspiratorial at times, in a divide and conquer kind of way, to get us all to stop acting in meatspace and live in this anxiety box so that the robber-barons can go on robbing the poor and raping the earth. Is there an alternative to this? Is there a way to create a more positive media?

RC: Last year, I went back to a bar I used to frequent in Chicago, and the same few people were there, sitting in the same places, having the same conversations. That’s what social media looks like after you take a break. It’s always baffling to see the same people posting the same stuff months later.

So, my first inclination is retreat. I’ve left every major social media platform and flirted with a few new ones, but I get fed up and deactivate them every few weeks. It makes for an inconsistent online presence, but I can’t be more consistent with it and still feel human.

Anxiety is lucrative. Once the social media platforms saw the goldmine of outrage, their steering users toward anxiety of one sort or another was inevitable. This has spread to every other kind of media. The goals are not information or entertainment as much as they are to elicit a reaction—any reaction. It’s turned journalists into trolls and the rest of us into dupes. There’s just more money in making people feel shitty than there is in making them feel good.

CG:What is the best way to help others?

RC: Fund their creative pursuits. Every problem I see my artist and writer friends and colleagues having is because there’s no money to do the cool things they want to do. I have the same problems, but I’ve sacrificed things and adjusted my lifestyle to facilitate the creative work I want to do, and subsequently I get to do some of it. The internet democratized and simultaneously demonetized everything.

To put it simply in a slogan: pay for art.

CG:I feel like we should all get together and create a better media. I miss the promise of the user-generated utopia. Do you think coding and computer engineering should be taught in public school widespread and starting at an early age? Do you think that if everyone speaks the new Latin, we can jumpstart society and get along without the new greedy and incompetent priest class?

RC: I can’t help but be cynical about the state of media at this point. The promise of the user-generated world has been fulfilled, but it’s no utopia. Computers, the internet, and ubiquitous cameras and screens have democratized every form of creativity. If one can be a “content creator” simply by aiming a lens, we’re not exactly honoring human creativity. DJ Scratch once said that the reason we respect something as an art is because “it’s hard as fuck to do.” Is the bar getting higher or lower?

A lot of my current students have majors that you would think would help (e.g., computer science, data science, information science, etc.), but the truth is that not everyone should be doing this stuff. The barriers to entry that existed before the internet were not tuned properly, but take a quick look at your feed, and you’ll see that we need some of them.

I think it’s all going to get a lot worse before there’s even a chance of it getting better.

CG:What does your ideal virtual community look like?

RC: A real-life secret salon. An invisible, intellectual speakeasy. I know a lot of smart, creative people. If I had a place to meet all of them on a regular basis and exchange ideas and collaborate on projects, that would be the ideal virtual community. If you went looking, you’d never find us.

Many thanks to Chase Griffin for doing this interview, Metapsychosis  for publishing it, and you for reading and sharing it.

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Jenny Toomey: Fits and Starts

In November 1993, a few months after I first moved to Seattle, I went to see Washington, DC’s Tsunami at the late, legendary RKCNDY. It was a magical time in a magical place, and I was marveling as the names on record sleeves and magazine pages emerged in the flesh. At the merch table, I met Fontaine Toupes of Versus (who signed my Versus 7” “Seattle ain’t shit!”), my friend and collaborator to this day Tae Won Yu, as well as Kristen Thompson and Jenny Toomey of Tsunami and Simple Machine Records.

Toomey is a towering figure in 1990s punk rock, playing in bands, running a record label, and so much more. She and Kristen Thompson, put out The Introductory Mechanic’s Guide to Putting Out Records, Cassettes, and CDs [.pdf link], which was repeatedly updated with new and better resources over four editions throughout the 1990s. After releasing nearly 80 records, Simple Machines ceased operations in 1998.In the meantime, Toomey has continued quietly trying to figure out how technology can serve music and musicians. She was the founding executive director of the Future of Music Coalition, and she worked in various roles at the Ford Foundation. She’s also working on a book about all of this stuff. In her recent op-ed piece for Fast Company, she recognizes a pattern repeating. Likening generative AI to the file-sharing wave of the early 2000s, she writes,

The potential bait and switch of the tech world today is worryingly reminiscent of the early 2000s. While new technology always promises a flashy quantum leap into utopia, it instead regularly delivers opaque systems that streamline mistakes from the past. Throughout 2023’s frenzied AI debates, my feelings of déjà vu have become undeniable.

After years working behind the scenes, Jenny Toomey is thankfully emerging again.

Roy Christopher: When the impact of the internet started to dismantle the music industry as we knew it, many touted it as a new DIY revolution, returning the means of production to the people. What did you see?

Jenny Toomey: I didn’t see it flatly that way. In the same way that I didn’t feel like punk rock solved the problem of consolidated corporate media. I mean, if you look back at the hippie movements, you can criticize some of the hippies as being sort of just hedonist utopic people in denial about the systems in the world and just rejecting them (drop out), and then you can think of other ones as pragmatic utopian people who say that if we’re going to live a different way, we have to model how to live that different way which is more “drop in” or Whole Earth Catalog or Our Bodies Ourselves or eventually DIY punk.

That’s the element of counter culture and punk that I really liked. Not the flashy nihilism of tearing the old down, but rather the joyful enthusiasm of building the new. Asking that increasingly unasked question, “Why are we consenting to so many things we don’t agree with? And what would it look like if we tried to build different systems to give us more and better choices?” So, putting out your own records is a piece of it. A nice piece… nothing wrong at all with putting out your own records, but it’s not going to solve the problem of highly concentrated corporate media systems in late-stage capitalism. It does offer you a way to not completely condone what you abhor. Simple Machines was very much about that… grasping at, or rebuilding a small patch of agency.

With Future of Music, it was a little bit more trying to bridge those two things, saying we’re actually at an inflection moment where the systems are going to change, and if we could model more open systems, more transparent systems, systems that artists had more say in the design of and more benefit from, then we might get both things. We might get to avoid the systems we hate while actually contributing to building new systems that we could love.

And for me, there was an idealism to it that came out of coming from DC and a kind of can-do quality, that kids that were my age that grew up in DC felt empowered—to DIY, to make your own thing. But we were also practical and pragmatic, because we’d done some of this before. When we put out The Guide to Putting Out Records, and we saw that it took on both of those problems at the same time. First, the guide let novices get on third base and be in charge of their own punk-rock destiny and put out their own records because we spelled out the recipe. But the advice and guidance in the guide wasn’t neutral, it embodied certain values. It looked across the scene and modeled better behavior and therefore it influenced how the scenes functioned. So, if a pressing plant was using bad vinyl, we wouldn’t recommend them, and if a distributor wasn’t paying independent labels, we would take them out of our recommended list of distributors, and if somebody like Barefoot Press was doing great work, we would enthusiastically promote them. It was a way of putting our thumb on the scale to amplify the kinds of behaviors and values and relationships and systems we wanted built.

RC: That was just the beginning though, right?

JT: Yeah, that’s what we were trying to do initially, before we started the Future of Music Coalition. We were just trying to figure out the best path forward for our own catalog. Kristin Thomson from SMR and Tsunami and I started the work as a project we called “The Machine,” which was basically a blog on Insound’s website that allowed us to share whatever we were learning about the music/tech space in real time. We would just sort of reflect on all of the different music distribution systems that were reaching out to Simple Machines as potential partners because there were like dozens of different companies that were all starting up. They all had different business models. Some would buy your copyright outright, and some would license it, and some would encrypt your music, some would stream, some would download. We had no clear idea which of these options were better or worse. So, a lot of what we were doing was trying to understand the trade-offs and make our best recommendations based on guidance from different experts that we ran into in our travels. Very often, once we’d published something,  other experts would come forward and disagree with some aspects of what we’d written and that back-and-forth would allow us to refine our recommendations and make the information even better.

We thought, let’s just do this until we can figure out what we want to do with our own catalog. Because we had like 80 releases and we had no idea what to do with them. Ultimately the music tech bubble began to burst, companies began merging and going out of business and getting sued by the major labels and we realized that that the emerging system wasn’t solid enough for us to recommend any of these companies. That’s when we knew we needed to set up an advocacy group. We couldn’t just recommend a good and trustworthy company, because that company would be out of business in a few months. Everything was in flux. Instead we realized we needed to advocate for a set of systems.

RC: That systems mindset is so important, zooming out enough to see the context of the changes you can and can’t influence.

JT: We believed that instead of just waiting around until everything was set in stone according to the desires of the most powerful companies, we could identify more artist-friendly systems we wanted to advocate for. That’s what it was about. And FMC served quite a useful purpose for a number of years, but then the bubble burst and the collapse of the marketplace put a lot of the idealists on their back foot and the concentration of control began to reestablish itself until it turned into the system we live with now.

It’s hard to remember the level of constant polarized propaganda that we live within now was once uncommon. Today controversial issues are sorted into a quick binary, and everybody finds themselves on one team or another in relation to most things. But that didn’t really exist back then. The internet started as a way to let a billion flowers bloom but ultimately played a starring role in fomenting that polarization. Just around the time that I left Future of Music. It felt like the copyright issues had become a total religious war. There was no discussion about the merits of the different opinions, and you were either on the team that were Luddites or you were artist-hating thieves. It was all caricatures, and in many cases the only ones who benefited from the public battles were the companies.

One of the main reasons I went to the Ford Foundation was to work on these questions at a systems level… I felt like we were not going to be able to build better systems if we were just focused on music. Music was the canary… It was the first industry where we could see the tech and society clashes, the trade-offs, the stakes. The systems that we were developing out of the music battles were on a path to impact all the other systems of journalism and publishing and film and democracy and everything else… as we’ve seen.

The systems that we were developing out of the music battles were on a path to impact all the other systems of journalism and publishing and film and democracy and everything else.

We forget that in the time before the internet there were public interest battles that led to rules that regulate newspapers, radio stations, TV…constraining the behavior of those who control the information pipelines. People fought to establish community-input requirements, ownership limits, and regulations to balance thought, constrain bias and propaganda. All sorts of rules and regulations existed for traditional media. But very few of those protections were extended clearly into the internet environment. Or if the rules did theoretically extend into this internet environment, it wasn’t clear how they would be enforced and by whom. So both the legacy media and the emerging tech companies went on the offensive and were able to use this moment of public disagreement and confusion as a fig leaf or fog behind which they successfully advocated for reduced regulation altogether. And that’s the world we’ve been growing accustomed to over the past 20 years. But it didn’t have to be this way.

Actually, the reason I started writing about music recently is because I feel like that same land-grab is happening all over again in the AI space. The optimism that I felt in the 90’s about the potential for the internet to transform society into a better place has disappeared and been subsumed into a kind of overwhelming powerlessness and pragmatic nihilism. An acceptance of how little protection we can expect from these surveillance and consumption systems that have basically threaded themselves through all of society. So, the piece I wrote for Fast Company was just trying to remind people of a time back when it was a smaller set of problems, focused on music. In retrospect it’s clear to me that we didn’t have to make the choices we made, and we shouldn’t have trusted the companies on either side to protect us because it’s now absolutely clear that they exploited us. And maybe we can learn something from that.

RC: Here’s hoping!

JT: I think part of this problem is now everybody is so dependent on the tech systems that validate them with likes and attention we’ve all come to think of ourselves as a brand, and everything’s intermediated in that way. There is so much time spent on navigation and optimization… that somehow if we do everything right, two-factor authentication and just the right amount of self-promotion and other bootstrappy bullshit, we can win the rigged casino game. It’s very strange to me, but we also just assume these bad systems are the best we can possibly have and that they are permanent. They don’t have to be, but we’ve lost the outrage and the imagination that we’d need to remake them.

RC: That’s one of the things you’ve been able to see very clearly, is that none of this is permanent. It’s going to change again.

JT: Right, right.

RC: There seems to be something fundamental about abandoning analog practices for their digital equivalents—or simulations thereof—that puts human authenticity in peril. Do you think that there’s a distinction there that’s meaningful?

JT: Yeah. The vertical integration of everything and the co-mingling and codependence of information, creativity, community, labor and the systems of delivery, commerce and connection all through a self-dealing commercial gateway mostly designed by technologists who never took a humanities class… It’s disgusting and it’s obviously tremendously dangerous.

You and I are a bit older and technology was perceived in a completely different way when we were growing up. So, to give you a personal example, I very, very reluctantly took a typewriting class in junior high because I believed I was going to be a powerful woman who was never going to work as somebody else’s secretary. The association to typing back then was clerical. There was a status association to whether you did the “thinking work” or whether you did “technical work” supporting the thinkers. And in the 80’s women were still very often seen as the supporters and not the thinkers. So, as a feminist, I felt reluctant to even learn typing because typing was associated with a service role I didn’t see for myself.

When the internet came, that shifted dramatically. If you couldn’t type or understand the value of typing as the gateway into the internet you were gonna seem outdated and square. I remember my mother left a pretty powerful job running a large non-profit. When she was trying to get her next job she had grown fond of saying, “I don’t even know how to type.” It was a badge of honor… a marker of her status as the type of woman who isn’t a secretary but who has a secretary. And I remember saying to her, “If you want to get your next job please don’t ever say that out loud again.” In the space of maybe five years “up” became “down”… and that’s just one example of how dramatic the shift was and how opaque and slow the cultural catch-up was for so many people, particularly my generation and those who were older.

RC: There are all of these invisible boundaries we find each other behind.

JT: When I went to Ford initially, that “othering” of tech was commonplace. Almost every single person who was recruited to run programs came from the academy, organizing, legal advocacy, policy advocacy—respected careers on the humanities side. Many of them carried with them bias-against, or incredulity or aversion-toward, tech as compared to the disciplines they studied and revered. This meant that they were incurious and had a gap in understanding just how thoroughly tech was transforming the landscape where they did their work. So, the smartest people, the ones with the power to stop it, sat back without contesting much of what the tech companies were doing till it was too late.

And it wasn’t until much, much later when I had a different role at Ford that we did research that allowed us to see that even the universities who were best prepared to graduate hybrid tech-experts, were actively siloing the tech away from the humanities. And we can all see how that turned out. So many of the clunky technical systems we are forced to use everyday (and live within) were designed by guys who were solving a technical problem on a deadline in a humanities-less void.

So, I think my major point is this one: We didn’t have to go into an environment where the internet was completely unregulated, because when you scratch the surface of the historic media rules—the rules that we have for telephones and the rules that we have for privacy and the rules that we have for equal opportunity and thousands of others—all of these rules should be enforced within the internet environment. But the advocates and the leaders who ran the nonprofits or the regulatory agencies that advocated for establishing and enforcing those historic rules were scared of tech, or functionally blind to tech. This meant that they functionally ceding enforcement. They back-burnered governance for long enough to normalize a digital world that lacks public protection. And while that was happening the tech companies became more powerful than the robber barons, and we all became complicit and dependent upon the systems they control.

RC: Is there a way out of that?

JT: There have been some moments of protest over the past 20 years, where artists have tried to demonstrate the value of their labor and their agency by saying, “I’m not going to be in your Spotify, or I’m going to build my own internet player that’s going to be artist controlled” or whatever. But in the meantime as the market becomes more streamlined and consolidated the stakes have become existential. The centralization of recommendation through the music players actually determines who can be seen as a legitimate artist and who is invisible. What’s worse, as the markets become integrated, how you are seen or “not seen” in those environments determines other things… whether you get enough attention to be paid any royalties whatsoever from Spotify… whether a venue will book your band without a certain number of likes or followers etc. We couldn’t even get a professional Spotify account for Tsunami if we didn’t have a Tsunami Instagram page to link it to. It’s way worse than I expected where all but the most powerful artists are forced to shop at the company store just to be in the game. And each post those artists reluctantly put out there to try to develop an audience is just more labor and content extracted to sell ads and train large language models, generating profits they will never share. So you go to Bandcamp to keep it real in the indie-sphere and that platform is actually owned by a Video game company and then they sell it… and you have to wait for the other shoe to drop… So, that just another reason to work with the largest companies that might not go away. Yuck.

I also wonder if that desire to be outsider and not self-promoting and secret is going to reestablish itself as a value in the same way that punk rockers said, I’m not going to look normal. I’m not going to sing pretty.

Tsunami: Jenny Toomey, John Pamer, Kristen Thompson, and Andrew Webster.


Kristen Thompson, who ran Simple Machines with me, shared an album where all the song titles were in Morse code, which of course makes it impossible for any of the algorithms to recommend their songs. There’s no way that this was an accidental choice, and that kind of decision does seem a little bit like an art project or as like a way of getting a different kind of attention because it’s so different from a word where constant self-promotion is just a precondition of being a creator or getting a next job or whatever we have at this moment.

So, I really don’t know how we disentangle those things. Maybe you don’t want to be on LinkedIn, but where do you get your next job? That’s where everyone’s looking. Maybe you don’t want to self-promote on social media, but if you’re going to try to do a tour, more and more often the clubs determine who they book based on numbers of followers.

RC: You’re speaking my language now. These are all problems I’ve been having.

JT: It’s that centralization of attention. I don’t think it has to be that way. We could have chosen a different way or built different kinds of technologies that would’ve allowed us to maintain agency, privacy and diversity… lots of smaller pockets of success coexisting… and we would’ve had more competition in those environments, and we would’ve had accountability because they’d be fighting for your business. It sucks that for the last 20 years, the people who were in charge ignored technology, and then—in my book I talk about it like the stages of grief. There was a very long period of denial and then, you know, bargaining and rage and negotiating, but so many of them still haven’t gotten to the place of acceptance. And when you’re in acceptance, you’re like, “Okay, the world we were in before, it’s over. My partner is dead now. I can’t have another vacation with them. It’s over,” you know? And now I’ve accepted this, and I am in my next life and it’s sad… but acceptance means I can begin to build a real life because anyone  that pretends we’re living in the previous world is in denial.

I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s certainly how I see it.

RC: Oh, it does… When I talked to Ian MacKaye, he mentioned the fact that punk was the last youth movement that used paper, which just struck me as such a brilliant insight that I’d never really thought about. He’s talking about zines and flyers and stuff. What do you think about that idea of paper being punk?

JT: I think paper contains the human gesture in a way that many forms of digital creativity does not. It almost always involves a greater level of scarcity. You could have the gesture of a human image or a human choice in someone who makes digital art, but it’s immediately replicable, you know? So, there’s not that scarcity in the same way—like people trying to create the artificial scarcity through the Bitcoin type stuff and those whatever they were called that everyone was talking about—

RC: NFTs?

JT: Yeah, but there’s something else about the pace of paper. It’s slower. Tsunami’s putting out a box set and Simple Machines putting out a box set with Numero, so I was forced to look at my archives. I have like 50 journals, and I had something like 17 suitcases packed with ephemera and letters—even before punk rock: I have a whole suitcase of all of my junior high school and high school correspondence, and it’s absolutely transformational.

RC: Absolutely.

JT: In almost all of the letters that I received in junior high school and high school people used fake silly names. They drew art on every envelope. They created collages. They were poets. There’s poems in there. There’s pictures in there. We were using every bit of our creativity to communicate with each other. And soooooo much time. These letters took hours. I can barely be bothered to write a full email these days or to listen to a voice message. Our level of attention is so fragile. It’s just destroyed. I had such deep attention, but everything is constantly distracting and pleasing us with little dopamine hits. We’re always jonesing now.

I also think that there was more of a barrier in some ways, too. There’s a privilege barrier. You had to have enough time to write all those letters, or the ability to cobble together a group house and enough part-time jobs that you had enough resources to be able to go on tour. So, when I think of how inexpensive it was to live when I was younger and how expensive it is now, it’s really shocking to me, but aside from that there was also a physical and time barrier to getting things out in the world. There were a lot of great bands that just didn’t have the work ethic to put the 30 to 50 postcards together to send them out to the clubs to try to get shows, because that’s how we got our shows. You wouldn’t waste money on a phone call. You sent a postcard to a club suggesting they might want to book your band without any ability to hear you at all.

RC: This is a whole other world.

JT: Part of what I really liked about working at Ford was we’re funding these brilliant visionaries who are getting the grants. They are the people who do the work, and they should have the platform and the attention to use their brilliant voices and it’s been a privilege to amplify those voices. But it also does mean that except in a few very specific forums, I’ve put my voice away for 16 years, and a part of that op-ed was also about beginning to think about, Well, what does Jenny’s voice sound like,16 years later?

RC: Exactly.

JT: That’s why I’m trying to write a book as well, but it’s really hard to write a book. I don’t know how you wrote nine books.

RC: Well, I’m glad to help in any way that I can.

JT: I mean, what I should be doing is not an interview with you but writing. I’m supposed to be writing every day, and I get to do it a couple days a week.

RC: You and me both!

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That Which Rolls

I’ve been riding bicycles—what the pataphysician, playwright, and avid cyclist Alfred Jarry called “That Which Rolls”—almost as long as I’ve been walking. I haven’t had a car since 1998, so bicycles have been my primary mode of transportation as an adult. Just after I built a new Big-Boy Bike a few years ago, a young friend asked me for some bike-building advice. I found myself qualifying my advice more than actually giving him any. I was trying to explain that I grew up riding BMX bikes, so I approach other builds from that background.

Me and my Big-Boy Bike at Forsyth Park in Savannah, Georgia. [photo by my friend Peter Relic]

The friend in question was in his early twenties, and as I started explaining my involvement in BMX in the 1980s, I noticed his brow crinkling. He didn’t get it. The further I went, the more I realized that I was attempting to bridge a generation gap.

My bike-curious friend didn’t seem to believe that BMX could’ve been that big in my youth. During my competitive Freestyle (as BMX trick riding was called back then) days, I lived in Southeast Alabama. We had bike-shop-sponsored local contests every other weekend and regional ones monthly, as well as shows to do and the occasional national event thanks to the AFA (American Freestyle Association). From the early-to-mid-1980s to the early 1990s BMX was hectic: My age class in those national contests often boasted well over a hundred entrants. One thing I tried to explain to my friend was that though we played video games (e.g., Atari, Nintendo, arcade games, etc.), riding one’s bike was still way more exciting. Our hands were far more likely to be found on BMX grips than joysticks.

The author kicking a blurry backwards infinity roll sometime in the late 1980s.

Therein lies the first major difference: The experience of a BMXer today is much more likely to be mediated by technology than it was during any previous era. Given the proliferation of technology into every aspect of our lives, that’s not much of an insight, but in addition to the lack of distractingly immersive video games, the riders of thirty years ago were also missing out on the parks. There were like three ride-able skate parks in the whole country. Now there are at least that many in every city of any size whatsoever. Where the past was spent riding curb cuts, banks, walls, streets, and backyard ramps, today the terrain consists of those as well as many human-made options. It makes for different bikes, different riding, different tricks, and different values.

Flatland used to be one-half of Freestyle BMX. Now it is obscured out-of-sight in parking structures and flat driveways. Its intricate moves and flowing connections do not translate to television coverage. The pedestrian spectator nor the beginning rider are able to tell the difference between difficult and impossible (I covered this more thoroughly years ago in a story for ESPN). The same can be said for other kinds of riding: flow and style are less valued than the big trick. One huge trick at the X-Games can make a career.

Riders still go looking for street spots and terrain to tackle, but back in the day—aside from backyard raps and plywood propped up on bricks—that’s all there was. The spread of skateparks changed not only the scarcity of spots, but the spread of information about those spots. Having a central place to meet and exchange ideas changes the dynamics of a local scene thereby affecting overall progression of the sport.

With that said, nothing has changed the collective knowledge of BMXers more than mobile technologies. Before cellphones, cameraphones, iPhones, smaller and smaller digital cameras and video cameras, and even the web, riders relied on a handful of magazines and zines to keep up on what was happening: new companies and products, who was riding for whom, and—more importantly—who was doing what new tricks. An individual or crew in some remote enclave could be light years ahead of the overall curve of the sport and no one would know. For example, when Kevin Jones burst onto the flatland scene in the late 1980s, it was due in part to his appearances at national AFA contests which were covered by the major magazines, but knowledge of Kevin’s progression was largely spread through the mail by zines and videotapes. Hiding such talent is much more difficult now—even if you try. Can you imagine Mat Hoffman’s Highest Air Ever happening in total obscurity today?

Mat Hoffman high in the haze, 1991.

Mobile media can make one famous. Like the X-Games, one huge trick—or one huge crash—captured on camera and immediately distributed online might not make a career, but it can make someone an instant star.