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Music

Owen's Video for "Lost" Finds the Beauty in Sucking at Skateboarding

Mike Kinsella calls on some of his very, very amateur skater friends for this video.

Hello, dear reader. A question for you. Do you follow the Instagram account Tired Skateboards? Well, you should, seeing as how it’s the best skateboarding account on the whole app. Sure, it may not feature the big, 20-stair 360 flips you’d see on Thrasher’s account or the kickflip-to-bluntslide-to-manual-to-switch-hardflip technicals found on Metro Skateboarding, but Tired Skateboards has one thing the big accounts don’t: heart. The infrequently updated account features videos of skaters who are a little older, slower, and a few pounds heavier than “traditional” skaters. But hey, they’re doing their best with what they’ve got to work with. They take pride in landing the basics: a short manual, a shaky kickflip, or… whatever this is. That feeling is also the vibe behind Owen’s new video for “Lost.”

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“Lost” features some imperfect-but-god-bless-em-they’re-trying skating from famed non-teenagers like Bobby Burg and Theo Katsaounis from Joan of Arc as well as Polyvinyl Records co-founder Matt Lunsford. And sure, Owen’s Mike Kinsella could have gone down to the local skatepark and paid some young shredders to land some jaw-dropping technical tricks for this video, but where’s the fun in that? Any teenager with a ton of raging hormones and a lust for danger can land a hardflip down a set of stairs. But try getting on a board after your doctor warned you to go easy on your body because you might exacerbate your hip dysplasia. Or when you’ve got kids at home who need you to stay alive and able-bodied because they rely on you for health insurance. Or when you’ve worked all day and are just plain too tired to skate.

And while skateboarding footage has provided the perfect visuals for pretty much any punk song ever, it’s an odd fit for Kinsella’s slow-paced acoustic jam about passing his wild years off in the face of fatherhood. But, somehow, the rudimentary nature of the ollies, heelflips, and pop shove-its along with its sunset slow-mo cinematography make the audio and visuals complement each other.

“Lost” is off The King of Whys, which isn’t exactly a recently release, and actually came out a year and a half ago via Polyvinyl, but again: embrace the video’s concept of effort over results!