The first time Lit frontman Ajay Popoff heard a crowd of people singing his lyrics back to him, in August 1999, was surreal in many ways. For one thing, “My Own Worst Enemy” had only been out for a few months. On the other hand, some 90,000 strangers at the Reading Festival shouted the words he had written, a bit different from the few familiar faces the group might see when watching them in an Orange County restaurant.
But the fact that it was mainly English people singing was the real highlight.
“They all had an accent,” Popoff said with a laugh. “Just the strangest thing.”
There are all sorts of stages for groups as they climb the ladder to immortality. This is your first show. Your first album. This is the first time you’ve heard yourself on the radio. Your first recording contract. Your first festival. But nothing beats the first time you hear your words come out of other people’s mouths.
“It was probably the biggest rush I’ve ever had,” Popoff said of that performance at the Reading Festival. “The rush of adrenaline, the goosebumps and the sensations that went through me, it was simply overwhelming. I remember thinking, man, if I could have a little bit of this every day for the rest of my life, I would die a happy man.
Nearly a quarter century later, Popoff still understands that, still hearing his words come from the mouths of thousands of strangers. Only now it is often through online videos that he and his bandmates are identified. And they come, among other things, from hockey matches. Somehow, a 25-year-old power-pop song has become the anthem of the 2023-24 NHL season.
And Popoff and his Lit bandmates can’t get enough.
“It’s crazy,” Popoff said. “We keep getting tagged in people’s videos from all these different games, and it’s amazing. It’s really cool because it’s a very diverse group of people that go to these sporting events. It’s not just about rock fans, it’s about a little bit of everything: rock fans, pop fans, hip-hop fans, country fans, whatever. So when there are so many people singing it, it’s like, wow, we’ve really kind of crossed a lot of boundaries and different tastes. It’s so cool to see that.
It’s no surprise to anyone that a rock song has caught fire in the hockey world. If football’s soundtrack is the classic themes of NFL films, if baseball is accompanied by the tinkling of a Scott Joplin piano in a Ken Burns film, and if basketball is set to the propulsive rhythm of hip-hop hop, hockey has always had a hard time. -rock sensitivity. Hockey fans will never be able to forget Fall Out Boy as the anthemic hockey band of the 2010s. Chicago’s United Center remained stubbornly in the 1990s throughout the 2010s, producing Pearl Jam, Tool, and Soundgarden throughout. throughout the Blackhawks’ most successful decade.
And just two years ago, Blink-182’s “All The Small Things,” another album released in 1999, became the unofficial theme song of the Colorado Avalanche, with fan chants at Ball Arena every nights. AthleticismThe book chronicling this memorable race was even titled “Carry Me Home”, a lyric from the song.
In 2024, it’s Lit time. At least 23 of the NHL’s 32 arenas have “My Own Worst Enemy” in their regular rotation this season. And there were chants – the crowd was screaming”PLEASE TELL ME WHYYYYY“Long after the puck has been dropped and the music has been turned off – in Las Vegas, in Detroit, in St. Louis, in Nashville, in Tampa, in New Jersey, in Seattle, in Minnesota and on Long Island. In Washington, the song is played in the third period when the Capitals win — “because we’re superstitious,” joked Alexa Ikeler, the Capitals’ director of fan development. Even the Big Ten men’s championship between Michigan and Michigan State had fun.
Long gone? Not this song.
“A band like us, who’s been together since high school, you write a song and you have no idea what it’s going to do,” Popoff said. “And then, 25 years later, you’re watching a sporting event and, by chance, a song you wrote is being sung by everyone in the arena. It’s not something we would have ever imagined when writing a song like that.
Hell, three of the teams behind the chants – the Wild, Golden Knights and Kraken – didn’t even exist when the song was written. So is there something universal about the song’s themes of youthful indiscretions, of excessive drinking and waking up still dressed, the smoke detector going off, a car parked on the lawn, the details of all the stupid things you’ve said that lurk just beyond the reach of memory. ?
Or is it just a killer opening guitar riff and memorable chorus?
Does it really matter?
The song is probably most ubiquitous in Chicago, where it has been played at almost every home game for about 15 years. But AJ Dolan, the Blackhawks’ music maestro from 2008 to 2018, had to credit his rival, the Red Wings, for the inspiration. Detroit played it regularly at Joe Louis Arena in the late 2000s, but it fit perfectly with Chicago’s alternative rock theme of the 1990s. The song was an immediate hit with Blackhawks fans, quickly becoming a mainstay at the United Center .
“(It) became obvious very quickly that people liked him,” Dolan said. “And no matter the time or the score, it was going to elicit an organic call and response from the crowd. It was also a genre we loved to play. So we played it every game, even though we got tired of hearing it. For someone playing for the first time, this would be fun and new for them. If we played this song after a Gene Honda (PA announcer) goal call, a big penalty, or at a time when UC was under pressure, it was definitely a 20,000 person song.
Dolan and his cohorts may have grown tired of the song, but Popoff never did. The thrill he felt 25 years ago in England is not far removed from the thrill he still feels, whether he’s playing a benefit concert at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville or watching a video of a sing-along at the Enterprise Center in St. Louis on Instagram. It’s cool every time.
Lit isn’t a one-hit wonder: “Miserable” was a pretty big alt-rock song in its own right, and the band has released seven studio albums, including 2022’s “Tastes Like Gold.” But “Enemy,” like Popoff calls it, is the song that put Lit on the map and the song that keeps them there. It was such a staple in 1999 and 2000 — the album went platinum and sold more than a million copies — that it actually hampered other Lit songs, Popoff said. RCA, the group’s label, played other Lit songs for radio stations, but those stations were still playing “Enemy” so often that there wasn’t enough air time for everyone.
“Alternative radio stations still play it almost as much as they did in 1999,” Popoff said with a laugh.
Lit is not a complete stranger to the world of hockey. The band moved from Orange County — where they formed in the late 1980s — to Nashville in 2020 and performed at the Stadium Series game between the Predators and Lightning at Nissan Stadium. Popoff became a huge Predators fan during his four years in Music City. And, for the record, the band is very open to having fun in any arena which has made “Enemy” a staple of their game playlist. Hey, every zeitgeist moment is worth seizing.
“I didn’t grow up very athletic, it was always music to me,” Popoff said. “I was more of the guy in the group. But I’m excited because hockey is the sport I loved playing, or even watching on TV. It’s the best atmosphere in sports. To be part of it? Hell yeah.
The benefits of Lit’s explosion in the NHL are difficult to quantify. Arenas have to pay a nominal annual licensing fee to play the songs they play, so it’s not like Lit gets a check every time a seven-second snippet of “Enemy” plays before a The hope, of course, is that people will hear the song at a game, nostalgic endorphins will kick in, and it will send them down a Spotify, Amazon, or Apple Music rabbit hole on their way to the game. back. Those fractions of a cent the band makes every time someone streams one of their songs won’t amount to much, but in the music business it’s all about touring, which means it’s all about above all to stay relevant. And the NHL and its fans help keep Lit relevant long after his peak.
“It just reminds people that, ‘Oh yeah, I love ’90s music,'” Popoff said. “Then they go home and put on their ’90s playlist and, just like that, you’re part of the soundtrack to their summer barbecues, to their road trips. We don’t necessarily make money when it’s played in the arena, but it’s just cool to watch and feel the energy, to see that people still enjoy a song that’s 25 years old.
“Can we forget the things I said when I was drunk?
We never get a real answer to this question in “My Own Worst Enemy.” But it’s clear the hockey world hasn’t forgotten the things Lit wrote when they were in high school.
“For so many people to connect over a song that we wrote, it blows my mind,” Popoff said. “Honestly, it’s hard to understand. But it’s really cool.
(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / Athleticism; Photos: Fred Kfoury III, Brett Carlsen, Dave Reginek / Getty Images; Group photos courtesy of Lit)