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KICK, PUSH & FILM

Christopher Adams spends a lot of time these days at his studio on the South Side, where he films, edits and develops ideas for new videos.

The 2,000-square-foot space has what one might expect from an up-and-coming director: an abundance of computers and video equipment, a forest of lights attached to tall metal stands and a handful of people milling about in the spacious, colorful rooms.

There are also skateboards.

It’s here that Adams produced the video for Lupe Fiasco’s hit song “Kick, Push, Coast,” a track about a young boy finding freedom on the back of a skateboard.

Adams first heard the song while driving, and he immediately called Lupe’s studio and said he had to do the video.

Adams recalled a studio executive asking: “Why should we give it you?”

“Because that’s my story,” Adams said.

Adams grew up around 104th Street and Normal Avenue, and he began skating in 1984 at age 15. Riding his bike out to Lake Michigan one day he saw a skateboarder execute an “ollie” over a beer bottle.

Awed, he stopped the skater and asked how he did it. The skater responded with an expletive and a racial slur.

“I said, ‘I’m going learn how to do that better than him, and the next time we meet, he’ll want to know my name,'” Adams said.

Though he never ran into the skater again, the incident prompted a lifelong affinity for skateboarding. He taught himself how to skate in a neighborhood where few people had ever seen skateboards, and he was soon jumping over the front of taxis with his skateboard, ripping through gang-related and affluent neighborhoods with equanimity. For him, doing the Fiasco video was about articulating that experience, relaying to the rest of the world the origins of the sport and the freedom and struggle that came with it.

“The black skaters in Chicago had to go through so many trials and tribulations, it was a rite of passage. It was hard to be a black skater, dealing with all the things in the ‘hood,” he said. “I wanted to capture that, and all I had to do was reach back into my own memory.”

If the cost of being among the first black skateboarders in Chicago was learning to ollie over the beer bottles and rocks hurled at him, the benefits were just as poignant. The video was his way to show the world that as well.

“I wanted to focus on the lifestyle and the freedom that skateboarding provided you. There are guys in my neighborhood that still haven’t been downtown, or out of the four- or five-block radius where their gangs are,” he said. “Growing up in the height of the crack era, a lot of my childhood friends are dead. Skateboarding was a way to keep away from it. It opened my eyes up to the way people were all over the city. Exposing myself to all those different people really opened me up.”

Adams still skates, though he eschews the hard knock tricks and jumps for a more casual approach.

“I ride through the halls all the time to clear my mind,” he said, pointing out at the open hallways of the building where his studio is located. “The second floor is almost empty, so I’ll just ride around, ride around.”