Smog and The Chasm
Bill Callahan pulls at the heartstrings // SOTY madness creates a new mini-season in the skate content calendar
Smog, “Rock Bottom Riser” (2005)
I saw a gold ring/At the bottom of the river/Glinting/At my foolish heart
I considered writing about a newer release this week — Tierra Whack’s trio of EPs, perhaps, or Roddy Ricch’s underwhelming sophomore effort — but in the end I only wanted to listen to Bill Callahan. I just started getting into this guy’s music last month, but the drawling melodies on A River Ain’t Too Much In Love perfectly complement the San Francisco rains, the stories of isolation stretch out against the winter darkness. And this guy’s voice — he’s like a cowboy Leonard Cohen.
But what strikes me most about this album is that Callahan is able to use such well worn imagery, such classic themes to produce a project that still feels honest and original. It’s easy to come off as trite when you sing about brambled valleys and sleeping horses, boarded-over wells and murky rivers, journeys in the wilderness as symbols of emotional growth. But the artist formerly known as Smog makes it all green again, shining like his dew-dappled branches.
Part of this is his stripped-down poetry. Callahan avoids overwrought verbiage that would turn his tropes to cliches, opting instead for simple scenes of nature that any listener could relate to. It’s like a shortcut to the heart — use familiar imagery to describe a familiar lonesomeness, and let the listener fill in the details with their own memories.
Maybe that makes it sound cynical — it’s not like Callahan isn’t speaking from his own experience. But the songs aren’t confessionals either, and remain vague enough to be taken as personal history or fable, at face value or as metaphors. Many can be read as heroes’ journeys: a disaffected protagonist enters the unknown, strives to accomplish a task, comes to a realization, and returns to his familiar life with fresh appreciation. But it’s never the only reasonable interpretation.
And from the bottom of the river/I looked up for the sun/ Which had shattered in the water
Consider “Rock Bottom Riser.” This appears to be a story about Bill losing himself in pursuit of success and being rescued by his family, but it could also be the story of a lost soul drowning and his parents pulling his body out of the water. Either way, our hero plunges into the muck, Callahan’s tone plummeting when he says, “I am a rock,” and looks back only when he reaches the riverbed.
And the pieces were raining down/ Like gold rings/ That passed through my hands
Whether he makes it back to the surface alive is up for debate. But at the bottom of the river, like Callahan’s heroes in the valley and the wood, he realizes he wants to return to the world. And with piano notes shimmering on the water above him, he thrashes upward, transformed. Whether he survived almost doesn’t matter.
Post-SOTY Season: The Capricorn Chasm
Skater of the Year discourse has reached a turning point. In the weeks before last month’s coronation, the internet’s howling monkeys seemed to shriek less about who might win SOTY (wasn’t it obvious?) and more about what the award means. There are those who see professional skateboarders’ fixation on winning something — anything, but especially a trophy from a magazine — as jockish and corny. Some folks miss the days when skaters didn’t campaign for SOTY and the Phelper, rest in peace, seemed to choose the winner on a whim (there’s the story about him deciding to crown Reynolds in 1998 after seeing just one kickflip). There are old guys who claim the award did not always matter so much, that the obsession with “SOTY season” is a recent phenomenon. And then there are others who just really don’t like Mark Suciu.
But when the world’s only literate skateboarder won the award, the conversation died down. Mark Suciu was SOTY, confirmed. The end.
The year, however, was not yet over, and in the following weeks, the world’s videographers squeezed the last line of toothpaste out of the annual content tube. This included the inaugural video from 917’s successor, Limosine, a Bustcrew full-length, and an all-SF Magenta clip. And in the wake of several relentless SOTY campaigns, these videos that all but disqualified themselves from end-of-year award consideration felt refreshingly organic.
Most likely, the skaters in these videos are just not concerned with the Thrasher Magazine award and therefore don’t schedule their video releases around it — Johnny Wilson, for instance, told Heckride that he hadn’t even considered Cyrus Bennett’s potential SOTY candidacy when he released John’s Vid in the final weeks of 2020, adding that he thinks “it’s cool for a video to just pop up and be good.” (It’s a testament to the video’s staying power that John’s Vid was voted 2021’s second-best full-length in the Quartersnacks readers poll.)
It’s also possible that smaller crews and brands withhold their videos to avoid being drowned out by SOTY madness. Or that some major videos sneak in just under an end-of-year deadline. Or that people release their videos to coincide with the holidays, when viewers might have more free time to enjoy them.
But there is another possibility: what if some skaters and filmers intentionally wait until after the winner is announced to avoid being included in the SOTY chatter, which grows more tiresome each year? What if, as skating expands and the categories of expressive skater and competitive skater become more distinct, even Rusty is coming to be seen as a tryhard’s grail? Yes, we may be witnessing the birth of the cool-guy Capricorn clip. But whether or not the timing of these holiday releases is intentional, it is always a relief to watch them without worrying that they are just means to a decorated end.