Big Brother 104

Issue #104, January 2004

January 2004’s Big Brother is a beautifully strange time capsule, pairing the magazine’s increasingly polished skate photography with its trademark willingness to disappear down some very odd rabbit holes. The skate coverage includes Ryan Gallant, Dicho in Australia, Brian Patch, and Raf’s Ecko Goes to Italy, alongside skate flicks, product reviews, video reviews, Goddamn AMs and the regular news and letters departments.

The issue also features Hammond, American Wrecks, Excessively, ZZ Top and Nebula, with Polycrap and the magazine’s famously unpredictable side material filling out the issue. The combination of international skating, interviews, music and deliberately bizarre editorial makes this a great example of Big Brother in its later years, when the magazine had plenty of serious skate coverage but still refused to act like a conventional skate magazine.