It’s 2015 and I think it’s fair to say that micro-cultures have effectively replaced coherent subcultures. In the pressure cooker that is that internet niche cultures are accelerated and disseminated so rapidly that they flare up and are subsequently extinguished before they can properly take root in the cultural consciousness. Think of slimewave, seapunk, normcore, and healthgoth — all aesthetic movements that faded away as quickly as they were reblogged, hash tagged, and turned into think-piece fodder. Of course there’s nothing inherently wrong with this process, it’s just another symptom of the modern age. To rally against change is to oppose progress, and that’s a dangerous road to go down. Still, with so much focus on the #nextbigthing in youth culture it’s refreshing to discover something retrospectively. So, please let me introduce you to a subcultural Australian movement that I’m pretty confident that you’ve never heard of — welcome to the world of extreme Boingo.
The Zoingo Boingo is nominally a child’s toy (recommended for ages 6 – 12), and they’re basically a modified pogo stick that takes away the metal components and replaces them with rubber and plastic. They’ve been on the market for years, and you can still pick one up at your local Toys R Us for about $35. But in the early 2000s something magical happened. Like most youth movements it required a perfect storm of opportunity and discontent. Think of those bored Californian’s who pulled apart roller-skates and bolted them to planks of wood when the ocean was too flat to surf, or the disenfranchised youth of ’70s England who stole a bunch of musical equipment and started a band called the Sex Pistols. Boingo takes elements of skateboarding and applies them to rural towns that don’t have enough concrete to skate in. It’s a rudimentary sport that seems like it should go hand in hand with off-brand energy drinks and Lynx deodorant.
When you couple this nascent movement with the advent of easily shareable online video, you get something something pretty special. Boingo speaks the language of country towns, of bus rides to shopping centres to browse Jetty Surf aimlessly, of school-organised blue light discos where you can get tipsy on smuggled generic vodka and vanilla coke and then maybe awkwardly fondle Laura’s boobs in the car park. Boingo simultaneously represents everything that’s awful and everything that’s beautiful about adolescence. It’s the purest articulation of suburban frustration, bouncing endlessly with relentless energy without gaining any ground. The lack of grace as they pogo sadly in playgrounds and backyards mirroring those first shuddering steps out of adolescence and into adulthood. Boingo is a pure virgin subculture that died before it could be corrupted by over exposure and commercialisation. Long live Boingo.