When the music video came to prominence in the early to mid 80s it opened a whole new world of multimedia opportunities for bands keen for their music to reach a wider audience. The visual stimulation of skateboarding was ripe for the picking and it wasn’t long before it started to appear in music videos; from the good, to the bad, to that which made you cringe so hard you literally implode and become a black hole of embarrassment and shame that what you have witnessed has associated itself with skateboarding.
We’ve tried not too include too many of the latter, although John Rattray and Flynn Trotman in a Billie Piper video had to be included for comedy value and you should probably watch Soulja Boy’s ‘Tony Hawk (Whip My Wrist)’ because although it features no actual skateboarding it’s one of the funniest and most ridiculous things to ever happen to popular music. Otherwise this is a fairly respectable list – a selection of skateboarding in music videos which, whether cheesy, odd or downright bizarre, has some fairly solid moments – and we haven’t resorted to such depths as the faux hardcore whinings of Cerebral Ballzy, or the song which we don’t talk about and which ushered in a whole new era of skateboard heckling in the early 2000s.
It’s a shame that music videos came around so late, imagine if this had a video to accompany it…
