You might not immediately guess that Simen Mitlid’s new single, “Backside,” out on July 23rd, is about skateboarding. After all, “skate music” has been defined in large part by the soundtracks that dominated skate videos from the 1990s. These songs and videos helped give shape to an MTV aesthetic that came together alongside the professionalization of the sport and the emergence of household names like Tony Hawk and Bam Margera. Historically, these tapes (and they were tapes, mind you) incorporated genres like punk, indie rock, and hip hop (think Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, A Tribe Called Quest, etc.). Not many – in fact none that I can recall – captured skaters performing against a backdrop of folk music.
For that reason, Mitlid’s new single is an outlier. You might argue that the reason is that the singer is from Norway, meaning that their formative years were forged in a completely different cultural landscape than the one described in the previous paragraph. I would suggest, however, that this single represents a completely different approach to and relationship with the physical act of skating. The musical form is not incidental but reflective of a unique ontology of skateboarding, one that considers the physical lessons, embodied intuition, and ruminative practice of the sport. In both form and content, “Backside” sounds like Nick Drake wrote a song about skating, and to be clear, I cannot think of a higher compliment.
The high-octane adrenaline and dated testosterone of those videos from the nineties play no part in this single. Instead, the song plays out like a slow-building meditation, blending guitar and orchestral strings for a more contemplative sound. Opening the tune, Mitlid sings, “I am just a headless coward.” This image depicts a narrator who appears to have an existential relationship with skating. Throughout the song, Mitlid reflects thoughtfully on failures and regrets, using the performance of the backside trick as a metaphor for these reflections. In only two and a half minutes, the musician offers a simple but compelling meditation on this metaphor while arguably re-imagining the relationship between this extreme sport and music. Check it out through the link below
Written by SilenceKid
