Through Being Cool
Through Being Cool
How I found myself in the eighth grade.
When I was growing up, my family moved every two years. We did stints all around the South, in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama again... My dad is an air traffic controller and to move up in that career, you have to move on. Apparently, out of consideration for me and my kid sister, we made all of these moves during the summers between school years, except one. In the fall of 1984, we moved from Level Plains, Alabama to Richmond Hill, Georgia a few weeks after the school year started. That one was to be the defining relocation of my early life.
The factors involved in this move’s impact on me are several. I was in the throes of adolescence. It’s a time of trying on identities and seeking out tribes. I'd tried various sports, played Dungeons & Dragons for a couple of years, but by eighth grade I had discovered the activities and music that still define me today: BMX, skateboarding, punk rock, heavy metal, and hip-hop. I wasn't a fully formed personality yet, but I had a few, new ideas. That move would help solidify my self like nothing before it.
At Richmond Hill High School, they had a leveled system within the grades. Group A was remedial, group B was regular, and group C was advanced. Ideally, one would take all of their classes within their group. I was an eighth-grade C, but some of the 8C classes were full. So, I had a few 8C classes, a two 9B classes, and 8B P.E. Yeah, it was confusing.
In addition, by the time I arrived, the school year was already underway. The usual high-school cliques had all been established, and as it turned out, I didn’t fit in to any of the alphanumeric groups, least of all the 8Cs. Theirs was a tight circle established over years of taking the same classes together, and I was on the outside of it. The ninth graders made fun of me for being in their classes yet not being one of them. It wasn’t long before I gave up trying to fit in anywhere. Being cool was just not a possibility for me. I had a few friends, but like any 13-year old, I felt more ostracized and alone. This only intensified my interest in the activities and music I’d found in the year or so before. By the time we moved back to Alabama nine months later, I had a much better idea of who I was.
Back in Alabama, I fell in with the BMX and skateboard kids. Skateboarding was on an upswing in the mid-1980s, and BMX racing’s nascent precursor to the X-Games, freestyle trick riding, was gaining popularity. In the ninth grade, I started the “Free Style Bike Club” to further my interest in BMX bikes and foster a community around riding them. It wasn't a total success. I think we officially met twice, once mainly to take the picture for the yearbook. There are a lot of people in that picture, but don't doubt for a second that we were the outcasts in southeast Alabama. Coach Weeks was not really into it. None of it was cool. I was just passionate enough about doing tricks on my tiny bike to do it no matter and just arrogant enough to organize something to support it. I tried to organize a similar group in high school, but was met with the same indifference. I think that group only met twice as well.
The summer before tenth grade, my friends and I started putting together a zine. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of making zines in my teens. These homegrown publications, cut and pasted together with scissors and glue and run off at the local copy shop, were the culmination of all the things that defined me. Making them taught me how to write about those things. My initial interest in the creation of these stapled-and-Xeroxed papers was laying out the pages. The grainy graphics of other zines still excites my eyes, and when I first saw them, I wanted to master all of the grungy photocopy techniques. Having grown up with an artist mom, I always thought I’d be an artist of some sort. I was even an art major for my first three years of college, aiming to go into some strain of graphic design.
Making zines also turned me into a writer. After all, if I wanted a review of the new Oingo Boingo or 7 Seconds record or an article about the 1986 Haro Summer Tour, I had to write it. By the time I finished undergrad, the writing outmoded the design, and I was an aspiring music journalist.
From mid-1984 until sometime in 1991, I did freestyle shows at community centers and schools and competed in BMX flatland competitions. Somewhere in there, I came to idolize the makers of the magazines more than the riders of the bikes. Where I’d always wanted to be a rider like Ron Wilkerson, Dave Nourie, or Dave Vanderspek, I soon wanted to be a writer like Andy Jenkins, Mark Lewman, or Spike Jonze. They were the crew behind Freestylin' and Homeboy magazines, as well as countless zines of their own. Though I was as in awe of the riding as I was the writing, I felt more comfortable with the words. I was--and still am--a mediocre BMX rider at best, but I felt like I could get better at writing and documenting these interests. One hopes that I still am.
When the BMX industry took a dive in the early 1990s, I continued making zines. I worked at record stores throughout undergrad, so, though bikes and skateboards remained among my zines’ pages, the content included more and more music. Once I moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1993, I put my DIY experience to work writing for regional music magazines.
If you’re reading this, then you probably know all of the interests above remain central my work. It was a cumulative effect, but that single move in the eighth grade galvanized my resolve and solidified my identity and its attendant activities: BMX, skateboarding, music, and writing about all of the above.
DISCONTENTS:
And I never really stopped... The latest zine my friends and I put together is called discontents, and it features stories on Ceremony, Hsi-Chang Lin a.k.a. Still, and Unwound; interviews with emcee Fatboi Sharif, Coherence director James Ward Byrkit, and Crestone director Marnie Elizabeth Hertzler; pieces by Cynthia Connolly, Spike Jonze, Andy Jenkins, Timothy Baker, Greg Pratt, and Peter Relic; cover art by Tae Won Yu, layouts by Patrick Barber and Craig Gates, and drawings by Zak Sally, Marcellous Lovelace, and myself.
It's 50 solid pages of good stuff about good stuff. Get yours here!
Mixtape Menage podcast:
Here's a clip of me talking to Eiliyas of Mixtape Menage about my move from zines to books, the part of my life that follows the story above:
Thank you for indulging me.
Hope you're well,
-royc.