What We Are Listening To: MC NYC #21
I boarded an underground train to interview an illustrator on Avenue A at 12:13 in the afternoon. The air was dry but not very cold. The train emerged from the tunnel and cast over the Manhattan bridge revealing a snowstorm had unleashed itself all over our sad pathetic asses. 'Marta Wainwright’s ‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole’ plays in my ears and reminds me as it now always does, of Gabbers.
The first time I ever saw Gabriel Summers in real life, I was at blue park in Brooklyn off Montrose L. He biked in alone, scoped the scene, locked his bike up near a bench adjacent to ours. He did a few stretches, liked some things on Instagram. He pulled his board from the bike’s basket and got on. He took two pushes, did a kickflip, rode back to the bench. He put his board on the basket, unlocked his bike, and rode off never to return - or at least, not while we were all there.
It was strange. It was as though he rode to blue to do a kickflip just to prove to himself that he could still do it, as though perhaps he had lost the knack somehow, like Samson’s hair being cut in the night.
How could a talent like that ever be at risk of being lost so casually? But perhaps it is this anxiousness - this daily concern for maintenance that makes Gabbers as good at skating as he is, and he is. A SOTY contender year after year, a SOTY winner in my heart three years running.
He is a diligent skater. Sponsor or no, he’d be doing single kickflips just because he wants to know that he can. This, I think, is the trait that sets the gifted apart from the greedy. There are a lot of people who do what they do not because of passion but because of the rewards; but you can see through them, the EA Skate’s of the world, and if there is anything that I am vehemently against, it is that.
On this playlist, you will find many artists scoring my snowy winter who were in the drudges of the industry for years and years before ever collecting any kind of substantial or sustained accolade. Many of them barely made their rent until well into their career. Grimes’ most beloved track, 2012’s ‘Oblivion’, was a single off of her third album - well into a career that up to that point had found cult support but hadn’t broken the glass of major gigs, and what a song it is.
Long before Elon and everything that came with him, without the help of either virality nor mainstream media promotion, Grimes’ 2012 single ‘Oblivion’ written about her experience as a victim of sexual assault carved out a large space for the artist in the hearts and playlists of skinny jeans-wearing hipsters in Brooklyn, their corporate counterparts stocking shelves at American Apparel stores across the nation, and perhaps most vitally, the chronically online inhabitants of their shared filthy/gorgeous Internet home: Tumblr (back when they were ok with tits and dicks). The track’s video is a memorably candid juxtaposition of the artist’s borderline-Cyberpunk femininity with the most classic and brash elements of 2000’s Americana and gratuitous masculinity, turning feelings of threat and fear into something both empowering and harmless.
Good tune.
