For an activity that often puts a high premium on self-destruction, it means something when a skateboarder dies.A skater’s death seems to mark the community—whether or not the circumstances bear any relation to the culture’s rebellious mythos, which often they do not. This is the case with Marc “MJ” Johnson, who died aged 49 on May 26, as revealed in a moving Instagram tribute from his friend and former colleague Louie Barletta. “It was less than a month ago that Marc came to San Jose to hang out,” Barletta wrote, clearly shaken by the abruptness of his passing. “He was sober, healthy, and full of life […] He seemed genuinely excited about the future.”The skating world is diminished without Johnson. He had a virtuosic technical ability, grace, and a puckish way about him. Where skaters at the turn of the millennium brought elements of languorous hip-hop machismo or punk’s louche delinquency to street skating, Johnson exhibited an idiosyncratic, considered style on a board. Juxtaposed by a clowning sensibility in skits and B-roll footage, the performance was belied by his unassuming indie presentation: brown cords, white tee, striped Matix sweater—with the added, unlikely flair of a fedora. View this post on Instagram Johnson founded Enjoi with Rodney Mullen in 2000, a company that would become known for pop-colored ads defined by a puerile absurdism and insouciance. The ads often had very little to do with skateboarding: their in-jokes were more likely to send up their own riders’ dorkiness or the self-seriousness of skateboarding at the time. Notwithstanding the controversy the brand would later court under different stewardship for its sexist jokes, Enjoi cultivated an alternative form of masculinity in a culture pushing increasingly narrow norms. Johnson’s life in front of the camera—both on and off the board—shared this spirit. His approach to the technical side of skating was singular. Johnson is so light touch he practically levitates; the crouch he takes before a trick is balletic, as is the articulation of his arms as he rides away fakie. He activated a whole other side to ledge skating, a way of gliding across stone and metal that seemed uncharted. He transposed elements of freestyle once considered kooky into cool historical street spots. His skating influenced a generation: most notably, perhaps, in his role as mentor to Jerry Hsu. The apex of Johnson’s career was the feature-length Fully Flared in 2007, with a blockbuster—and then unprecedented—12-minute final part, which bagged him Thrasher Magazine’s coveted Skater of the Year trophy. The mythology of the part, and the impossible task of following it that he set himself, would be “roasted” by Will Arnett playing a hyper-invested skate bro in a skit for the film’s follow up Pretty Sweet in 2012. But Johnson’s output was prodigious, and he returned in Pretty Sweet with a more conventional-length but still remarkable video part. It opens memorably (and archetypally) in the pastoral playground of West Coast skateboarding, the high school, with a confident two-trick line that is molded like a single unbroken phrase drawn through the balmy air. After all, Johnson grew up in an era defined by the challenge of durational projects rather than clips, when each video part had to be better than the last. “Johnson is so light touch he practically levitates; the crouch he takes before a trick is balletic, as is the articulation of his arms as he rides away fakie”Johnson was clearly an enlightened person who recognized creativity as something not to be taken for granted. Skate media often eulogizes the youths of skaters when they’re still alive, and filmmakers were attuned to his thoughtful optimism. Some give space to his striking meditations: “The craziest thing about skateboarding is you can say ‘what if,’ you can take something that is pure thought and make it reality,” he muses in Modus Operandi. In Hot Chocolate: “If you can think of it, you can pretty much do it on a skateboard.”In Barletta’s words, Johnson was “that skater, like a lot of us, who didn’t grow up rich, had too much energy, tried a little too hard sometimes.” He gave everything to skating, and beneath that tenacity was a streak of melancholy that can be felt, if nowhere else, in the multiple dramatic head smacks in Fully Flared or his straight-to-camera inventory of injuries (“Two holes in my back. Hit my head and tore a hole in my hand. I met up with that dude. He’s here, I was there, I met up with him. Let’s do this.”). In a sobering 2020 interview for Thrasher, he revealed that his punishing commitment to filming for the video drove him to compulsive eating and drinking. It is painful to note that when asked by Patrick O’Dell whether his commitment to achieving groundbreaking parts was worth it, he said, “I honestly don’t know.”When people think of Johnson, they often think immediately of his Crailtap years; his affiliation with the skater-owned triumvirate of Lakia, Chocolate, and Girl, headed by Mike Caroll and Rick Howard. This turned messy in 2013 when Johnson, then approaching 40, left Lakia for a deal with Adidas, and was publicly fired from Chocolate in an ungallant interview given by owner Mike Carroll to Jenkem Magazine. Having your pick of sponsors at 40 is relatively uncommon in a culture preoccupied with youth, and Johnson reasonably prioritized financial security after being faced with a diminishing paycheck. The issue seems to be how Johnson communicated this to Carroll, but—without knowing the details—it’s hard not to read it as a waste of what they made together.Not least because failing to ascend through the narrowly defined ranks of an acceptable skate career can have tragic results. (See, for example, Antwuan Dixon. Skateboarding fetishized his volatility and excess, but seemed less certain what to do when those qualities ceased to be entertaining. Historically, skateboarding has been better at redemption narratives than supporting people through periods that make redemption necessary.) But even when the going is good, skateboarding’s capacity to provide a refuge for those who, like Johnson, come from hardship and abuse, is partial. In a story now all-too familiar since skateboarding has taken a more therapeutic turn over the last decade, he “had no tools in my bag to cope with the type of pressure that we eventually ended up under.” Johnson’s reflections point to a broader tension in skateboarding. The culture is built on the premise that another way of living is possible, one organized around creativity, intimacy, playfulness, and transgression. It is rightfully proud of that story. But the same commitment to this other life can leave skaters vulnerable. The pressures Johnson described were not incidental to his career, but bound up with the conditions that made it possible. It’s not a coincidence that when Johnson’s career began to falter (or “fall apart,” in Barletta’s not uncertain terms), the camera began to turn away: Johnson’s controversial first appearance in the Adidas film Away Days, was unavailable online until only recently.“Even when the going is good, skateboarding’s capacity to provide a refuge for those who, like Johnson, come from hardship and abuse, is partial”Skate culture’s desire to document is obsessive (in the words of one critic, there is an air of “film or it didn’t happen”). When a skater dies, we have the very bittersweet benefit of a wealth of archival material to immerse ourselves in, by dint of the fact they have been living in front of a camera for so long. Skateboarding videos, which are non-linear in structure and almost exclusively reflect a youth demographic with a general disregard for the future, occupy a curious temporal realm. For a while now I’ve had a suspicion that this betrays an anxiety that skaters will not live beyond their frame. This fleetingness is reflected in the profundity that Johnson espoused and Evans sought to capture in Modus Operandi and Hot Chocolate, his ways of saying “somedays [skateboarding] is like a sixth sense.” But I also feel it in the ledge tricks and lines that Johnson cut—a precarious, sublime sense of flight, and the silhouette of a man transcending his own conditions.The post Marc Johnson Gave Everything to Skating appeared first on VICE.