Pílula #6 — Skate and music

Por Cláudia Pereira e Marcella Azevedo

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We consider that the streets, slopes and obstacles of the city are key to the skater’s course. The music, always intrinsic to their daily practice, gives rhythm to the transgressor mobility in the city. The skater performs subjectively his “topological” (according to Michel de Certeau (1994), “deforming the figures”) and “delinquent” route (“dismantling and displacing codes “) through the “flow”.”Flow” is a slang used mainly by rap singers, designating the way by which they fit their verses in the beat of the music, but also the way they sing them (faster or slower). In skateboarding, the word is quite the same: flow can have two senses, the first refers to the ability — has flow the skater who makes seem easy a complicated maneuver; and the second is related to a stream of events, a context, an environment, a lifestyle, a daily life, ultimately leading our actions and decisions — a singer is in rap’s flow and a teacher, in the flow of academic life. The song, for the skaters, is a kind of narrative that provides not only concentration and rhythm to their performance, but also a specific spatiality, perhaps of subjectivity, through which the city is in-bodied or is culturally absorbed by the body.

Sometimes I wake up and I want to give a quiet spin, then I put a rap, I put a reggae to give a spin like this only to enjoy the day (Nuno, 21, of Nova Iguaçu — RJ).

Thus, the skater, now immersed at music, and modified by it, however fully articulated with the paths and traces of the city, is a reflective subject, or the result of a subjective reflexivity driven by the beating at rhythm and the lyrics touching in his headset. The music, in words, establishes for the skater a “third” city: not the planned one, not the transgressed one, but the subjectivized one — an endogenous city.

I do think we see the city in a different way. The other people look at the city, they don´t see anything, so they only see objects but for us it is like a playground (Rodrigo, 41, of São Paulo — SP).

It’s like an amusement park, right? (Paulo, 21, Bauru — SP).