Cvlt Nation’s New Skate Video List Reads as a Personal History of the Culture

Cvlt Nation just published a piece that doesn’t announce itself as a definitive ranking. It’s a written loop of memory, a list of 20 skate videos that the writer frames as a letter to a friend. The friend is Natas Kaupas, the Los Angeles skater who reshaped street skating in the 1980s. The list is the vehicle, but the real center is a personal timeline that begins in 1975, when the author’s family moved from South Central to Venice Beach.

That move placed him inside a scene still taking shape. He names the Z-Boys who schooled him: Dennis Agnew, Sergio, Solo, Froggy. By the 80s, he writes, Venice had a new generation of skaters aligning with the hardcore punk movement without ever leaving their boards. The article sketches that shift in a few concrete images: watching Natas land an ollie, seeing Mark Gonzales debut a handplant, realizing the quiet kid Julien Stranger tore up the Pavilion.

The selected videos stretch from those foundational moments through San Francisco’s singular role in the culture and into the reality of skating New York City traffic with Dipset blasting. Nothing about this is academic. The writing is knotted with firsthand knowledge, and the curation feels chosen rather than exhaustive. A casual reader might miss that the piece is also an elegy for a particular kind of street-level community that happened in real time, face to face, before everything got archived.

For anyone who cares about the intersection of skateboarding, music, and place, the Cvlt Nation piece works as a document of how a culture gets carried forward. Not through institutions, but through people who remember exactly who showed them a trick and when.