F*cking Love Them 2024: Joseph Campos
Campos killed the year, and 4tS has come to praise him
Welcome to the inaugural edition of ‘Fucking Love Them,’ 4ts’ very own end-of-year award, a kind of Canal St. SOTY based solely on the following rhetorical q: who, if asked, would I say I fucking loved the most this year?
a hagiography for the sluts:
Do you hear the song? Do you ever hear the song, their fucking song, when you need it? When you don’t? Does it push in — with the pain, with the elations, with the blood, with forces through flesh and sinew and muscle and ego and commitment and fear? — and does it echo and empower, flips down the knight’s visor, and tells you all you ever need to know: fucking GO?
Because cheek to pavement, I do. They ring, like angels and sea lions, like tornado sirens, like strains from three rocky islands, loud and sharp and far-reaching above bass billowed and frayed as a shipwreck sail, spanning a calendar year.
There was a website I loved —🌹🌹🌹,for its grave — and an author I loved, Alex Pappademas. He once wrote, in a best songs of the year feature, his no. 1 criteria for the honor: whether or not the song was capable of pushing everything else from your head, pushing away reality itself and shifting something inside of you. I’ve always loved that, and find myself turning frequently to The Pappademas Test.
Shocking Moments Caught on Video passes.
Joseph Campos? Fucking Love Them.
It stems from a slam, one of those throwing star slams — Campos looking sidereal maybe Hockey’s Jumpman or Jerry West, joked his “Heads” feature [Thrasher, #523, Feb. 2024] — flung from a roof when his wheels bit, and Ricky Eat Acid’s ‘Slo-dancin’ comes in.
‘I heard the music is loud,’ Kelly Hart prefaces the Nine Club review of Shocking, a soundtrack that opens with, of all things, a scorching cover of the Zelda theme cut into the mirror shield; that’s by design, Chris Roberts assures his podcast partners, the point — loud.
(Campos took that slam, btw, telling Burnett [ibid.] that while he thinks it’s doable, door’s currently closed for him. ‘There’s a few done for the days in this video,’ Roberts noted. For his part, Campos claims he slams basically every time he skates in his ‘5 Greats’ feature [Thrasher, #531, Oct. 2024].)
It’s a fearsome fall and a lasting image and could be any other skater’s career claim to fame in an era when clips loom large as full-lengths. But it won’t come close to defining Campos’ career; fuck, it didn’t even define his year. Across three different parts — Shocking to start 2024; a plum position in the middle of Nike’s Quickstrike; and Shot on Location, a bookend shortie which served as an un-scored announcement of his newly minted pro status — Campos threw hammers like he was trying to murder a Mario bro.
Killed.
His massive kickflip into the Water Street bank took the top spot on Quartersnacks, both for the week it debuted and for all of ’24. An enormous, prismatic frontside acid drop — Campos is something of a roll-in monster — punctuates his part in QuickStrike, and a brutal bannister hop of a flip and towering 5-0 burn into the brain from Shot. ‘There’s just so much that can go wrong right,’ Roberts says of a trick I didn’t even mention above. And sure, skaters often hit that point, but Campos brought it routinely, stabbing at you again and again like you’re the slut in a slasher movie.
There’s a refined violence to Campos, a slight imposition — he goes about 5’4” and 110, per the above interview — that belies just how brutal some of these moves are. There’s a lightness, like this glide of a kf 5-0, suffused with something savage, hitting as human machete.
Consider the tricks which are seared into my mind: front lips and 5-0s, massively popped shuvs of both persuasions, roll-ins and roll-ons. Comparatively ‘simple’ tricks, but done with such style —and on spots of such scale — that they are undeniable, that they pass the Pappademas test in and of themselves.
“He’s so fluid on his board, that he could be doing any trick and it’d be fun to watch,” George Phillips, founder of Four Down, tells me.
The Black Nike Butcher, some fabulous writer had previously bestowed Campos as an unasked for nom de guerre; what must it take to own an article of clothing?, to render the Swoosh a synecdoche? No joke I will never buy the beautiful black-with-white because that colorway is too deeply associated, in my mind, with a level of gnar I just can’t live up to. It’s silly to say, sillier to see in text, may be the kind of self-suppression supposedly anathema to skating, but for me it’s something of an ultimate compliment; the cardinals don’t wear a pallium, right? It’s a fucking mark of respect, b/c I won’t even try to fill those shoes.
(All the better that Campos cares about the ‘fits, something he shares with his beholders; see Quartersnacks’ José Vadi on his Shocking wardrobe seeming made ‘from the ashes of Heath Kirchart’s all-white Stay Gold uniform.’)
They are there, present, the vestments on a triptych of tricks which, for me, were 2024:
First, from Quikcstrike, the massive frontside roll-in into a color blocked bank, stanchions disconnected for a dive bomb, one in a long line of the divine move — can you tell I love a four fourdown? — that has become something of an ad hoc signature; see this pair of absolute fucking hammers in Hockey’s X. This one serves, unbelievably, as an amuse bouche for something even MORE bonkers later on.
That would be the towering ride-on grind which inspired the collage above, a clip so savage I initially thought he may have closed QuickStrike with it. It was, instead, something of the ultimate halftime hammer, bifurcating the video in my mind. And don’t you dare try to give me any fucking shit, any wahwahwah ride-ons wha for that one. It’s an impossible spot to hit otherwise, and almost an impossible spot for even the best skater’s eye. Very, very few motherfuckers would notice that as something skateable, perhaps seeing some kind of ‘SKATE ME!’ fever dream at best, and even less would dare attempt it.
But it’s perhaps the Water Street kickflip which so impressed the ‘snacks that will be Campos’ indelible mark on the year. Massive and steep —more decapitated pyramid than bank — it would take some kind of possession to even roll-in backside, much less toss the kickflip, snatch it mid-air like a peregrine, then flash down the face of it before absorbing the curb. For Phillips, its one of his ‘all time favorites,’ which is saying something from a skater who knows what from.
‘I cannot imagine committing to that one.’
That slam was the dark side to domestic skating, Vadi noted. Fitting, since the video is chock-full of house spots. Shocking’s routine assault of a rail-chomping realtor was maybe the strongest signal that Campos would help define the year to come. Almost a year later, when I see a bone-white home hubba out the passenger side window over the holidays, I dream and ‘Slo-dancin’ screams. It’s been a banner couple years for four downs as well, Campos’ array of heavy ones in X marking him out as a master of the form, something solidified in 2024 with two John Henry hammers which shone even in a hardware stores’ worth of them.
In this and other ways, Campos has been of the year in ways beyond, I think, my own impression of it. But it’s my own impression this essay and art and ‘award’ is meant to celebrate, after all.
Joseph Campos? Fucking Love Them.
