In skateboard rap, hip-hop mashes up with another street culture

On the remix for "Kick Push," a hip-hop paean that has been all over urban radio and BET, Chicago MC Lupe Fiasco and producer-rapper Pharrell Williams trade rhymes detailing an unexpected slice of life in the streets: skateboarding. Fiasco raps about skateboarding as a form of rebellious self-expression, peppering his vocal with the names of street skating tricks and common injuries-even some intricacies of skateboard-borne romance. "I don't think this board is strong enough to carry two," he informs a girlfriend. Williams, by contrast, fills his rap with a prickly issue of racial identity: the loaded condition of being a "black skater from the 'hood."

With the popularity of so-called "skateboard rap" like "Kick Push," the divide separating America's two most influential street-based subcultures is narrowing. Skateboarding, that quintessentially suburban "extreme" lifestyle sport, and hip-hop, in which street credibility is often measured by gunshot wounds and time served, seem to be having a "your chocolate is in my peanut butter" moment.

Skateboarding and hip-hop started kicking each other's tires in the early '90s when skaters adopted rappers' baggy-jeaned look and hard-core rap replaced punk rock as the de facto soundtrack to the X Games. Both white and black cultures share an in-your-face immediacy created by disenfranchised youth. And, not coincidentally, skaters and rappers have turned raging against the machine into multibillion-dollar businesses with global reach.

Williams, 33, dismisses any questions of his commitment to the skateboard/hip-hop overlap. He became a skater and credits the lifestyle with shaping his worldview. Further, Williams cites his co-sponsorship with Reebok of the Ice Cream Skate Team as proof that he wants to hybridize the cultures, to show black kids that there are alternatives to the gangsta lifestyle. Not coincidentally, four out of five team members are black.

"I send 'em around the world, I put money in their pockets," he said. "I'm trying to open the door so other people can come through and help spread the culture - to offer kids in those areas an alternative. You can do a trick on a skateboard and be cool and earn money. The chicks will love you - just like you're selling dope."