As I was breezing through the endless flow of online edits to see if anything was worth posting, again disappointed . I was transformed back to my youth for a brief second when I realized I had just received a new SNOWBOARDER magazine that I had not yet perused. Once I thumbed passed a bunch of ads, I could not care less about, I land on a sweet little piece about creativity in snowboarding featuring a trip to Quebec with the Quicksilver team. Since I love poutine and french accents I started reading and judging post haste.
The article featured a bunch of youngsters that were having a group chat about getting shots and creativity in snowboarding. One of the points young buck Ted Borland made was in relation to people being “artsy” and how you can do it without being a “pussy”. Mr. Borland was contenting that you can do all the new school “moves” and do them on big features and make it look good.
As I am want to do, I started thinking, and had the following thought:
If you are unfamiliar with “artsy”, then maybe a class at the local learning annex, taught by your favorite over dramatic thespian is in order. If you have seen or participate in the movement, please start explaining yourself. To an outsider like myself, it just seems like snowboarding has gotten so big that people can get sponsored for “looking at things differently”. Which in raw form is awesome. I have witnessed many events where people went at a gap, rail, jump or line and rode it in a way I did not consider. That is art. The pure form of snowboarding (& skiing) is to do it your way. No coach necessary, no pep talks at half time, no wins or losses, just you and whomever else you choose to explore the terrain and world in front of you. I dig it man.
However, I feel like a lot of young pups today do not send the gap bigger or ride a line differently (some do and they are sick) but mostly many copy what others before them have done and claim it to be their style. You see it everyday, “look at that fake Bradshaw” or “he is the new Tanner Hall”. Even worse, is that this sub-sect of shredding simply is not very good. They have watched all the films (but claim they haven’t, because the are too cool) and realize they do not have the moves of a serious rider. So instead of getting better through time and experience they just do really small tricks on stupid features and claim that they are artists.
Let me clear this up for you, all of the world’s renowned artists mastered their art form before they tried something different. Picasso, Beethoven and even Nicolas Muller who rode and won contests, learned all the tricks and handled all the big lines in Europe before he put on that stupid animal fur hat and destroyed powder in Japan. The message here is own your craft, study it and be able to perform your master stroke, then you can be over it and just do duck unders with a cool scarf and pack of menthols.
-Dr. Crockett
