All my teenage feelings
On American Football's LP4
Today's feature is about the career of and the new album by everyone's favorite emo legends American Football.
"The eventual return didn’t feel anything like those other bands or artists running through the greatest hits of teenage millennial music past because the American Football of the past was a band that barely existed in the first place," Kevin Koczwara writes. "The most beloved act that no one ever saw. Instead, this was the mysterious lore of a lost band, a perfect record, and a warm glowing light from a window in a nondescript home in Illinois."
Koczwara previously wrote for Hell World about the fears of being a parent raising children in the age of school shootings.
Luke O’Neil
"Who can go to a mall or a concert or any place really without second guessing the decision? Who would bring a child into this world? Who would bring something so precious as a child into a place filled with hate and violence? My wife and I have. Two little kids — seven and four years old now — who weren’t alive for Sandy Hook or Columbine or Texas Tech or any of the hundreds of other mass shootings before they were born. But they’ve been around for enough mass murders that it feels like they’re possibly numb to it already."
He also wrote about his favorite Jason Molina songs.
Luke O’Neil
All my teenage feelings and the meanings
by Kevin Koczwara
When we’re young time moves at a glacial pace. Every moment seems like it matters. Waiting to get your license or your first kiss takes forever. As we age the space between moments blurs and all of that accumulated life appears as if it happened yesterday. A song from twenty years ago still feels fresh, as if it’s playing in your friend’s car, that one blown-out speaker rattling a little with each bass thump. And why not? It only just happened.
What we constitute as new or old shifts too. How do we measure the years between a proposal, marriage and children? It no longer makes any sense. Each passing year feels like a minute. A month is a snap of your fingers and a day is the blink of an eye. Our lives stretch out, counting down toward the inevitable. The journey lengthens and contracts with no escape.
For American Football time created the perfect circumstances for a band that never intended to do much of anything to become itself. Three young friends wrote nine songs. Recorded them in a garage. Their other friends decided to release them on a record before they graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. No one would hear from them again they thought. The band had played a few shows before and no one showed up. At first there weren’t even lyrics to go with the noodling guitars and oddly-timed drums.
When Polyvinyl Records, still in its infancy, released the self-titled album in September of 1999, the same month Fight Club premiered at the Venice Film Festival, there was no tour. No album roll out. Copies went out to college radio stations and it found a bit of airplay, but by and large no one yet knew the importance of what they were hearing. Pitchfork was still in its infancy and blog band culture didn’t exist. There were zines and scenes, but a band that broke every rule and bucked against the scene they grew up in themselves — the midwest emo world that singer and guitarist Mike Kinsella helped forge with his brother Tim as teenagers playing in Cap’n Jazz —was supposed to disappear.