Tony Hawk Ride Soundtrack
Tiffany Crutch
The soundtrack has been announced for Tony Hawk: Shred, the second game to use the skateboard controller bundled with last year's Tony Hawk: Ride. Unlike Ride, the game is apparently aimed at a younger audience and includes snowboarding as well as more arcade-style tricks.
The soundtrack includes selections from A Day To Remember, Anberlin, Appleseed Cast, At The Drive-In, Bad Religion, Biffy Clyro, Braid, Burning Brides, Circa Survive, Coheed and Cambria, Deftones, Devo, Far, GBH, Guttermouth, Hot Hot Heat, Jimmy Eat World, Living Things, Moving Units, OK Go, Rise Against, Rival Schools, Social Distortion, Story Of The Year, Surfer Blood, Ted Leo, Texas Is The Reason, The Comas, The Soft Pack, The Stooges, The Swellers, Vampire Weekend and Yellowcard.
For a lot of people, the light-as-air guitar riff and clear-blue horns that prologue the song "Superman," by Goldfinger, can surface memories of a simpler time, when ska was something you might have been expected to know about.
I never owned a Tony Hawk video game myself, but I do have an older brother. This past weekend, Jorge and everyone else got the chance to revisit this cultural artifact via the remastered Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2, released on Sep. 4. The level maps and game mechanics are mostly the same as they were 20-odd years ago, this time rendered in 4K, with some new features like an online multiplayer mode, new goals and additional tricks from later games. Jack Black is there. Along the original roster of playable characters (aged up to the present), you can play as a younger, more diverse set of skaters including Nyjah Huston, Leo Baker, Leticia Bufoni, Aori Nishimura, Lizzie Armanto, Riley Hawk, Tyshawn Jones and Shane O'Neill.
The soundtrack, one of the game's most enduring legacies, also features 37 new musical artists, in addition to most of the originals, from A Tribe Called Quest to Sublime to Screaming Females to Skepta to CHAII to Machine Gun Kelly and more. Jorge messaged me a photo of his hand outstretched, pointing to a corner of the screen reading "The Ataris - All Souls Day," that he captioned "gasp."
This was years before I'd aspire to Not Be Like Other Girls. I was like other girls and, like other girls, I would go on to play GameCube games like Bratz: Rock Angelz and Mary-Kate and Ashley: Sweet 16 - Licensed to Drive, the latter of which licensed real-world songs to give shape to a low-poly beach-pop Mario Party knockoff that provided me my first taste of cool-girlhood. Pro Skater was similarly accessible.
Jorge was my guide to cool music. I'd eventually struggle to balance a laptop as I downloaded Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends" on LimeWire, as my mother furiously brushed and blow-dried my hair. For Jorge, those early moments of discovery and connection first came through Pro Skater. He still can't hear "Blitzkrieg Bop" without being transported back to Pro Skater 3, and has a Mandela-effect recollection (supported by Google's autocomplete feature) of loving the Goldfinger cover of "99 Red Balloons," which actually never appeared on a Tony Hawk soundtrack, but on Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec. Lagwagon's "May 16," from the second installment, was another favorite. The soundtracks were his and my first glimpse into punk, whatever that had come to mean, and the spirit of irreverentcounterculture that had become incredibly profitable by the turn of the millennium.
Whether it was the righteous ska of Goldfinger or the political awakening of The Dead Kennedys' "Police Truck," each song burned its influence on a host of musicians, too. "Let's ride, ride, how we ride," Jello Biafra snarled to an entire generation of kids receiving early educations in edge.
She remembers playing the game alone a lot, growing up in the Maryland house she's speaking to me from, holed up in the den and illuminated by the blue light of a screen like the rest of us. She always played as Rodney Mullen. "I do remember being very excited that there was one Black skateboarder in the game, and being like, 'Yes!' And then also excited that there was one girl," she recalls, referring to Kareem Campbell and Elissa Steamer. "And I was like, 'I don't know who to pick!' "
Okusami had grown up on pop-punk, hardcore, grunge and skate tapes long before the soundtrack reached her in Rockville, Md. in 1999. She recounts her CD collection back then: Sublime, the Offspring, Our Lady Peace's Clumsy, the beloved NBA-rap-tape Basketball's Best Kept Secret, and, foremost of all, Green Day's Dookie and Insomniac. I hear her smile as she tells me that Dookie was the first CD she bought with her own money, at Best Buy. "I remember getting my dad to drive me there and seeing it and picking it up and my hands and being like, 'yeah, it's mine.' "
Besides "Police Truck," other standouts from the Pro Skater oeuvre included the Adolescents' "Amoeba," from Pro Skater 3, whose chorus a teenage Okusami misheard as "Tony Haaawk!" ("I remember being like, that's so cool! He's got a whole song about him on here," she laughs) and Primus' "Jerry Was a Race Car Driver," now permanently associated with skating.
The game made her feel seen. "I think that was something that was really cool about it: Maybe they had this target demographic, but it still very much appealed to a lot of people who were outside of that," she says. She just didn't think about it. "I think that's partly because of what skateboarding in general is, and part of the music that they picked, because it's a lot of stuff that the people who are outside the mainstream were listening to also. So it kind of felt like a nice little home."
The D.C. punk scene became another home. She loved that at every show, the desire to have a good time always overlapped with people tabling for a just cause. The Pro Skater soundtracks featured the sounds that surrounded her in D.C., without feeling co-opted or forced.
She released her post-apocalyptic debut full-length as Oceanator, Things I Never Said, in August. Things I Never Said explores the fallout from personal and political apocalypse, and the world after the end of the world. The album's nine tracks non-linearly explore anxiety, depression, loss and healing from trauma, each song an elastic reaction and response in real time. Rooted as it is in pop-punk, post-hardcore and grunge, the record has none of the bombast of 1999 but all of the radical desire to be known, and a self-aware earnestness. (If she had to choose her own song to feature on a Tony Hawk game soundtrack, it's a tie between "Heartbeat," "Mistakes" from her 2018 EP Lows, and the power-pop "A Crack In the World.")
"Lupe Fiasco was just casually playing on a lawn with nobody on it, and it was like, the most pivotal moment in hip-hop to me," she remembers with reverence. "I'm a sixth grader, seeing Lupe Fiasco, like, two feet away from me singing 'Kick, Push.' I was like, this is exactly the kind of music I love."
Most other days, Bojorges-Giraldo's life was much quieter. She grew up in a Mexican-Colombian household in Irvine, local to all "the skate beaches" like Newport and Huntington. "[Irvine] was so quiet that I think the most community-connecting thing that was going on when I would go outside my house was seeing other skaters," she remembers. She got her first skateboard in elementary school, and spent afternoons playing and skating outside with her neighbors.
The guys in her community had their own skate crew. She remembers tagging along with them at first, filming their sessions for tapes. She gradually became part of the crew herself. "All these are kids that listened to hip-hop and are avid Wu-Tang Clan fans," she laughs. All of them were also partial to Pro Skater 4.
"Once I heard 'By the Time I Get to Arizona' by Public Enemy, that was such a staple moment," she said. While previous Tony Hawk games (particularly Pro Skater 2) included rap, hip-hop and, lamentably, rap-rock, she considers Pro Skater 4 to be a turning point in how the franchise treated the genre, at a time when she was starting to see it embraced more widely by mainstream skate culture. She fell in love with the way the games married punk, grunge, hardcore, rap and hip-hop. "For me, that was monumental."
She loved the community of musicians and videographers that skating cultivated. "My goal from that moment on was like, OK, if I'm not a pro skater, I got to be able to get some music in these skate videos," she remembers. Throughout high school and after, she gave beats to friends for their skate tapes, creating a "mini-discography" in local footage.
She'd been making music since middle school, but it was in high school, when she started her SoundCloud, gained a better grasp of Logic Pro and Ableton Live in her senior year, and decided on her alias (her dad used to call her "little panther" as a kid) that she fully became St. Panther, the artist. From 2012 through 2014, she remembers recording and making beats for local musicians, "hacking away" at fifty-dollars-an-hour or fifty-dollar-flat sessions, "penny-scraping" just to get producing experience. Now, she's released her debut EP These Days, a brisk and comprehensive introduction to St. Panther's range, not only as a producer, but as a songwriter, singer, and rapper.
For Bojorges-Giraldo, growing up being identified as a woman, both the music world and the skating world involved a lot of knocking on doors. "Women are always put in this position, I think in industry in general, where you have to do five times the workload to prove that you're a part of the community and someone that's dependable for the same types of work," she said. "So it was kind of cool having a group of inclusive men around. I was the girl for the first couple months, but then I started becoming the bro, and it was really nice."
She identifies as non-binary now, using she/her and they/them pronouns. "I started becoming integrated into these communities [that are] obviously masculine-dominant, but there's definitely space for us, if you are brave enough to try to make some," she says.