Skateboarding, Video Games, And Indie Rock

In the latest B-side from SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS, Brendan Menapace explains how skateboarders used indie rock in 2000s skate videos. PLUS: We touch on how video games turned young millennials on to indie.

I’m going to tell you a secret about my book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion: The history it tells is not totally complete.

The many rave reviews will assure you it’s quite comprehensive in recounting 21st century indie rock’s mainstream breakthrough and gradual metamorphosis into pop. This is true. The book covers a great deal of territory, and I’m extremely proud of it. You should stop what you’re doing and buy it right this second. But there were some parts of the story I knowingly left out—like, say, the instances when I wanted to spend several paragraphs Remembering Some Guys and my wise editor had to nudge me out of the weeds and back onto the path. And because we all have our blind spots, there were also a few subplots of indie rock’s glow-up I did not realize I was leaving out.

One of those omitted storylines is the role of skateboarding videos in turning young millennials on to indie music. On the way to a Yo La Tengo show a few months ago, my friend K.C. mentioned how much he associated indie rock with skate videos he watched as a kid in the 2000s. Not long after that, Brendan Menapace, a writer whose work I’ve published at Stereogum, expressed a similar sentiment in a post on Bluesky. I never was a skater—in middle school, I often sat and played guitar while my friends rode their boards around basements and parking lots—and I only had minimal exposure to skate videos. So it never even occurred to me that they would be a pathway to indie rock for some people.

In an effort to fill in the gaps, I got on a video chat with Menapace and asked him to school me in the ways of skate video indie rock. This inevitably led to a discussion of the Tony Hawk franchise and other skateboarding video games, which opened up a portal to an even more influential element of 2000s pop culture: video game soundtracks. Guitar Hero and Rock Band alone brought countless kids into indie music’s big tent, and that’s before you factor in all the non-music games that laced their soundtracks with indie hits, from sports simulators to RPGs like Grand Theft Auto.

The video game angle feels so expansive that I may decide to explore it in more depth later. In the meantime, Brendan and I touched on it here along with lots of discussion at the intersection of iconic skate videos and emotionally charged indie rock. Read our conversation below.

When did you start watching skate videos, and what kind of soundtracks were you generally hearing?

Pretty much the era you're talking about, early 2000s, is when I started watching them. Back then, not to sound like one of those “back in my day” kind of things, you did have to wait until someone had a VHS or a DVD of it. Now everything's just on YouTube immediately, but back then it was a lot more like albums, where it's like you had to wait for the new Baker video, the new Girl video, the new such and such video, so it's a lot more of a monolithic thing.

Most videos you watched, it felt like it was either punk or metal; skating fast and hard, it lends itself to that. And there's a lot of hip-hop for street parts. It was a way into the person's personality to an extent. Sometimes I think it was random, sometimes not, but those are the ones that kind of blend in. I can't think of a time where it was like, “Oh yeah, this metal song really amplified the part,” you know? Cause it feels like that's what every [video] had.

There's a few hip-hop ones that stand out, like Eric Koston used Public Enemy on one that worked really well. But when you tweeted this thing about indie rock, I did have these [flashback] moments of, like, Daewon Song used the Killers in his Almost: Round Three part. Or I know the Walkmen are in the montage of Hot Chocolate. So those two stick with me.

Maybe it's because that was a lot of music that I gravitated towards and was already watching the skate videos, so it was cool to see that these guys I thought were so cool also like these bands. There were definitely a couple times that I found bands from those videos too.

That was kind of like my experience with stuff like The O.C. where it's like, “I know these bands!” Like Leo DiCaprio pointing at the screen. But you are saying that there are some indie artists that you discovered through skate videos too?

Yeah, I think Interpol is one of them. Anecdotally, they feel like one of the ones that's weirdly used the most. Like Jeremy Wray uses “PDA” in the Elementality video. Brian Anderson used “Obstacle 1” in Yeah Right!, which a lot of people would say is the most cinematic or best skate video of all time. It’s a Spike Jonze movie, so it has a lot of cinematic elements. There's a lot of carefully chosen music in that one.

So, yeah, Interpol is one that I found. Guy Mariano used Band Of Horses’ “The Funeral” and “Is There A Ghost” in Fully Flared, which is also one of my favorite videos ever. And then at the same time, I think “The Funeral” was used in the game EA Skate. And I think it was because they had used it in the video. Rather than Tony Hawk just taking songs like that they feel like should have been in a skate video, Skate was trying to replicate a skate video by actually taking songs that were in a video. Like, that same video, Fully Flared, Mark Johnson uses “Goodbye Horses,” so that's in the game too.

Tell me about what you felt like the indie rock songs were supposed to convey, as opposed to punk and metal songs.

It definitely felt more purposeful. Like you can watch Mikemo Capaldi's part in Fully Flared. Now that I'm putting this together, there's a lot of those [from Fully Flared]. But he uses “No Cars Go” by Arcade Fire, and it definitely feels like the point was to be very cinematic and rather than just like “Look at him skate fast to this fast song” or “Look at these cool tricks to this very smooth song.” It's the same way in that same era they they use a lot of this era of music for movie trailers. Like think about the Where The Wild Things Are trailer with Karen O and all that. It's supposed to be big and cinematic and artistic and all of that rather than just heavy.

Skateboarding in a lot of ways has been behind in terms of—like, I've written about it in terms of depictions of the homeless. But it was late to even accepting openly gay skateboarders until pretty recently. The fact that Brian Anderson was—it was a big deal when he came out a few years ago. It's getting better, but I feel like it is [still] lagging behind. So you use something where it's, for lack of a better word, maybe intellectual songs—I don't want to say that it's smarter than anything else, but it's maybe supposed to convey something more emotional than just “I'm flinging myself down a flight of stairs.”

And you know, again, there's nothing wrong with that. And it's not to say that the guys who use that kind of thing are just knuckle draggers, ‘cause that’s oversimplifying it. But I think there was a lot of like posturing as tough or macho, whereas this was kind of the opposite. Like, “Look, I'm using this very heartfelt song, I'm using this very emotional song, and it's not used ironically.” You can go too far into that where guys are using Journey or yacht rock or these really sappy love songs, where it's clearly the other end of that bell curve, where it's like, “Ha, wouldn't it be funny to use this goofy song for skateboarding?” This really is more like, “No, this is a great song. This is a powerful song. It's gonna have the effect that I want, and it's gonna maybe even give a clue into the kind of person I am. I can't put words in any of these people's mouths. I haven't met them. But that's the sense I got is that it's a bit more thoughtful.

You mentioned a bunch of different skaters in a bunch of different videos. Were there any skaters who gravitated towards indie stuff more frequently or were associated with indie?

I don't know about associated. You had a lot of them—like Jason Dill, who used Spoon in the Habitat Mosaic, he used “The Way We Get By” and “Someone Something.” He has always been a pretty well-documented New York art scene guy. Like there's that famous picture that I think a lot of people don't know as him. There's a famous picture of him on 9/11 just kind of standing, looking hungover like with the Twin Towers behind him. He's just kind of one of those omnipresent New York party guys, like he's friends with like Chloe Sevigny and all those people from that era. The backdrop of Meet Me In The Bathroom was very much overlapping with guys like Jason Dill.

As the internet was opening up and you were following the skate scene, did you get the sense that people were discovering these bands through these videos, or that your friends were?

Yeah, I think so. You go on like the Slap message boards and people were talking about what I was basically saying to you—hearing that Arcade Fire song and being like, “Oh yeah, Mikemo in Fully Flared.” Like they know where they saw for the first time. And definitely the Tony Hawk games too. I mean, Tony Hawk had used Bloc Party, TV On The Radio, the Kooks, the Walkmen. Skate used “The Funeral,” Skate 3 had Animal Collective. There was another Animal Collective song in a later game. So people do—the same way they found music in the Tony Hawk games, I think it was an intro to this kind of thing the same way you might have found Slayer for the first time in a [skate] video or you might have listened to Public Enemy for the first time. But the fact that those are the ones that stuck with me, I think [this kind of music] also lends itself to a big cinematic piece.

You’ve mentioned a few different skateboarding video games that incorporated indie music. I know video games in general were like a huge pathway for people discovering music in that era. Obviously you've got Guitar Hero and Rock Band, but then you got all these sports games too. I think I really underrated how many people got turned on to a whole range of music from video games. But it seems fair to say that skate video games probably had an even broader reach than skate videos.

Yeah, for sure, and I think before the internet was what it is, where it's so easy to find stuff, you were kind of limited to your CD collection back in the day. The same thing goes for your DVD collection. I knew my friend had Elementality or I had Almost: Round Three on DVDs, so those are the ones we could watch/listen to and find music that way. And same with video games. Your friends had one game, you go to their house and you're like, “Oh, what's this song?” and then it turns you on to that.

When I posted Dirty Projectors on the Such Great Heights video accounts, I was amazed how many people replied, like, “NBA 2K13!”

Oh my God! For sure, like, the NCAA 06 game had Superchunk and NOFX. I've cited that game as one of the best soundtrack games. Pixies are on that. Yeah, NCAA 06 was honestly huge for music on par with anything in skateboarding.

I'm seeing now there's a news article on Pitchfork about the Grand Theft Auto V soundtrack. It feels like video games took over for movie soundtracks in terms of what was kind of exposing kids to music.

You’ve got a couple of movies that have heavy needle drops, but when I think about that I mostly think of like Wes Anderson who's just playing like British Invasion stuff, you know?

That’s how I discovered the Stooges is through The Life Aquatic.

Or those 2000s movies like (500) Days Of Summer where it's, like, in the plot.

I definitely got into that in the book. It has a chapter all about the Hollywood era when indie rock was somehow part of the plot. Michael Cera and The O.C. and all that. Those are kind of an exception. At that time we had moved past the event movie soundtrack. We've gotten it back in a couple of instances lately, like Barbie. But by the time this indie rock explosion was happening, it seems like being featured in Guitar Hero would have been a lot bigger look than being on whatever movie soundtrack.

Maybe just this genre lends itself to main character energy, and that's kind of why you have things like (500) Days Of Summer. And then to go back to skateboarding, then you have these guys who are like, “No, I don't want the same Slayer song, I don't want the same Suicidal Tendencies song. I don't want the same Three 6 Mafia song that everyone's using. I want to use Interpol. I want to use Band of Horses. I wanna show that I have this more vulnerable side.” And again, I've never talked to the guys who make these videos like this, so I can fully be talking out of my ass. But that's kind of what I got was that it showed a bit more vulnerability and thoughtfulness than the music you'd expect to hear in these kinds of things.

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out Aug. 26 via St. Martin’s Press. Pre-order it here.