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August 26, 2021
Kyle Beachy's Playlist for His Memoir "The Most Fun Thing"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Kyle Beachy's memoir-in-essays The Most Fun Thing does for skateboarding what Barbarian Days did for surfing; a vulnerable, thoughtful, and insightful look into the pastime.
The Chicago Reader wrote of the book:
"Transform[s] the ordinary into the extraordinary. . . . Beachy has written a book about skateboarding unlike any before it."
In his own words, here is Kyle Beachy's Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Most Fun Thing:
Here are eight songs that have come into my life by way of the activity I’ve spent thirty-some years practicing, or not from the activity, exactly, but rather the culture that surrounds the activity, a culture composed as they are of fashion and music and aesthetic values, and beyond those what we might be inclined to call a certain attitude. A culture, I mean, premised on relationships with the phenomenal world, a mixture of vision and performed embodiment, which is to say a certain selfhood. A certain spirit.
But we don’t have to go that far. The cleaner truth is that skateboarding is built and shaped largely by the audio-visual projects that skaters will make from the footage they collect of their friends, edited into forms variously traditional or experimental, scored and given titles, then distributed as videos that last anywhere from eight minutes to over an hour. Most of these filmmakers are amateurs with names you’ll never know, and some are employed by one or another brand to make videos of skaters who all, as a “team” (some of these words…they’re so wrong), receive free goods—boards, wheels, pants, coconut water, etc.—from the brand. So, the films are advertisements at their core, but not only advertisements, and perhaps, when such films were emerging as recognized cultural objects in the late '80s and '90s, perhaps even slightly ahead of the curve re: the vulgar romance between culture and promotion.
Anyway. If you are a skateboarder you will know these songs, you’ll know from which film they’ve been lifted, you’ll know who skated to the song and feel a haunting at the hands of the song that spins the memory out of your mind’s depths, the terrain and bodily movements you remember from the part, perhaps a certain fit—a New Era cap and blue windbreaker and a pair of khakis and old Half Cabs with the thin white vulcanized sole—an interaction with police or pedestrians or the unhoused people of whichever city, snippets of dialogue, just gradients of engagement all the way down.
There is no real logic or parity to this playlist, no best of, no real theme of which to speak. My process was: sit here and indulge a dip into memory, then emerge having plucked out a sequence of songs from those vast reserves that will last roughly as long as classic skate videos. Not a great tool, really, for winnowing. In any case, here they are, songs that in some very real ways made me who I am now, age 43, with aching knees and scarred elbows and a love that only grows more baffling the longer I indulge it.
Kyle Beachy's first novel, The Slide (Dial Press, 2009), won The Chicago Reader's Best Book by a Chicago Author reader's choice award for the year. His short fiction has appeared in journals including Fanzine, Pank, Hobart, Juked, The Collagist, 5 Chapters, and others.His writing on skateboarding has appeared in The Point, The American Reader, The Chicagoan, Free Skateboard Magazine (UK & Europe), The Skateboard Mag (US), Jenkem, Deadspin, and The Classical. He teaches at Roosevelt University in Chicago and is a co-host on the skateboarding podcast Vent City with pro skater Ryan Lay and others.
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