The first time Lit frontman Ajay Popoff heard a throng of people singing his lyrics back to him, in August 1999, it was surreal on so many levels. For one, “My Own Worst Enemy” had been out for only a couple of months. For another, some 90,000 strangers at the Reading Festival screamed out the words he had written, a bit different than the smattering of familiar faces the band might see looking back at them at an Orange County joint.
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But the fact that it was mostly English folks doing the singing was the real topper.
“They all had accents,” Popoff said with a laugh. “Just the weirdest thing.”
There are all sorts of milestones for bands as they work their way up the ladder toward immortality. There’s your first show. Your first album. Your first time hearing yourself on the radio. Your first record contract. Your first festival. But there’s nothing quite like the first time you hear your words coming out of other people’s mouths.
“That was probably the biggest rush that I’ve ever had,” Popoff said of that Reading Festival performance. “The wave of adrenaline and goosebumps and the feels that went through me, it was just overwhelming. I remember thinking, man, if I could somehow have a little bit of this every day for the rest of my life, I’m gonna die a happy man.”
Nearly a quarter-century later, Popoff is still getting that, still hearing his words coming out of thousands of strangers’ mouths. Only now, it’s often via online videos he and his bandmates are getting tagged in. And they’re coming from, of all places, hockey games. 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 of it.
“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 such a diverse set of people that go to these sporting events. It’s not just rock fans, it’s a little bit of everything — rock fans, pop fans, hip-hop fans, country fans, whatever. So when it’s that many people singing it, it’s like, wow, we’ve really sort of crossed over 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 the soundtrack to football is the classical themes of NFL Films, and baseball is scored to the tinkling of a Scott Joplin piano in a Ken Burns film, and basketball is set to the propulsive beat of hip-hop, hockey has always had a hard-rock sensibility. Hockey fans can never forget Fall Out Boy as the anthemic band of 2010s hockey. Chicago’s United Center stubbornly remained in the 1990s throughout the 2010s, pumping out Pearl Jam, Tool and Soundgarden throughout the Blackhawks’ most successful decade.
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And just two years ago, Blink-182’s “All The Small Things,” another 1999 release, became the unofficial theme song for the Colorado Avalanche, with fan singalongs at Ball Arena every night. The Athletic’s book chronicling that memorable run was even named “Carry Me Home,” a lyric from the song.
In 2024, it’s Lit’s time. At least 23 of the 32 NHL arenas have “My Own Worst Enemy” in their regular rotation this season. And there have been singalongs — the crowd belting out “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 are winning — “because we are superstitious,” joked Capitals director of fan development Alexa Ikeler. Even the men’s Big Ten championship between Michigan and Michigan State got in on the fun.
Long gone? Not this song.
“A band like us, that’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 randomly a song you wrote is being sung by everyone in the arena. It’s not something we would have ever fathomed when we wrote a song like that.”
Heck, three of the teams prompting singalongs — the Wild, the Golden Knights and the Kraken — didn’t even exist when the song was written. So is there something universal in the song’s themes of youthful indiscretions, of drinking too much and waking up still dressed, the smoke alarm blaring, a car parked on the front lawn, the specifics of all the dumb things you said lurking just beyond memory’s grasp?
Or is it just a killer opening guitar riff and a memorable chorus?
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Does it even matter?
The song is likely most ubiquitous in Chicago, where it’s been played at nearly every home game for about 15 years. But A.J. Dolan, the Blackhawks’ music maestro from 2008-2018, had to credit the rival Red Wings for the inspiration. Detroit was playing it regularly at Joe Louis Arena in the late 2000s, but it fit Chicago’s 1990s alt-rock theme beautifully. The song was an immediate hit with Blackhawks fans, quickly becoming a mainstay at the United Center.
“(It) became evident very quickly that people enjoyed it,” Dolan said. “And no matter the time and score, it was going to gather an organic call-and-response from the crowd. It also was a genre we loved to play. So we played it every game, even though we were sick of hearing it. For someone’s first time at the game, it’d be fun and new to them. If we played that song after a (PA announcer) Gene Honda goal call, a big penalty kill, or in a moment the UC was energized, it was a 20,000-person singalong, no doubt.”
Dolan and his cohorts might have gotten tired of the song, but Popoff never has. The thrill he got 25 years ago in England isn’t too far off from the thrill he still gets, whether he’s playing a benefit at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville or seeing a video of a singalong in St. Louis’ Enterprise Center 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,” as Popoff refers to it, is the song that put Lit on the map, and the song that keeps them there. It was so inescapable in 1999 and 2000 — the album went platinum, selling more than a million copies — that it actually got in the way of other Lit songs, Popoff said. RCA, the band’s record label, pushed other Lit songs for radio stations, but those stations were still playing “Enemy” so often that there wasn’t enough airtime to go around.
“Alternative radio still plays it almost as much as they did in ’99,” Popoff said, laughing.
Lit isn’t a total stranger to the hockey world. 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 has become quite a big Predators fan in his four years in Music City. And, for the record, the band is very much open to getting in on the fun at any of the arenas that have made “Enemy” a staple of their gameday playlist. Hey, every moment in the zeitgeist is worth seizing.
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“I didn’t grow up very athletic, it was always music for me,” Popoff said. “I was more the band guy. But I’m stoked because hockey is that one sport I loved going to, or even watching on TV. It’s the best atmosphere in sports. To be a part of that? Hell yeah.”
The benefits of the NHL’s Lit explosion are hard to quantify. The arenas have to pay a nominal annual licensing fee to play the songs they play, so it’s not as if Lit is getting a check every time a seven-second snippet of “Enemy” is played before a faceoff. The hope, of course, is that people will hear the song at a game, some nostalgic endorphins will kick in, and it’ll send them down a Spotify or Amazon or Apple Music rabbit hole on the drive home. Those fractions of a penny the band makes every time someone streams one of their songs won’t add up to much, but in the music world, it’s all about touring, which means it’s all about staying relevant. And the NHL and its fans are helping to keep Lit relevant long after their heyday.
“It just reminds people, that, ‘Oh yeah, I love ’90s music,’” Popoff said. “Then they go home and they pull up their ’90s playlist and, just like that, you become part of the soundtrack to their summer barbecues, their road trips. We’re not necessarily making money when it gets played in the arena, but it’s just cool to watch and feel the energy, to see that people still appreciate a song that’s 25 years old.”
“Can we forget about the things I said when I was drunk?”
We never get an actual answer to that question in “My Own Worst Enemy.” But clearly, the hockey world hasn’t forgotten about the things Lit wrote when they were in high school.
“For that many people to connect on a song that we wrote, it blows my mind,” Popoff said. “Honestly, it’s hard to wrap my head around. But it’s really f—ing cool.”
You can buy tickets to every NHL game here.
(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Photos: Fred Kfoury III, Brett Carlsen, Dave Reginek / Getty Images; Band photos courtesy of Lit)
