The American Football House and Urban Solitude
In 1999 a two year ‘art project’ which consisted of three young guys — one called Mike and two called Steve — released an LP which would at the time go unnoticed. Fifteen years later this LP would be re-released, peaking at number 68 on the Billboard 200 chart and now as fathers, Steve, Steve and Mike have embarked on a series of international tour dates to embrace the cult following amassed over the past decade and a half. The band, as the title suggests are American Football and the LP is titled American Football (or self titled 1). It would become hugely influential amongst the more sensitive side of guitar rock in the 2000’s and beyond.
The album itself is the product of after school jam sessions which resulted in ‘labyrinthine two-guitar interplay, set to jazzy time signatures’ whilst Mike Kinsella lays out his earnest teenage heart by pulling lyrics straight from his old journal. According to Rolling Stone, American Football’s debut is ‘one of the most devastating breakup albums in the history of breakup albums’. The emotion this album conjures up can be as complicated as the guitar tunings and time signatures utilized by the band. For a heady mixture of melancholy hope, joy and sadness wash over the airways, imparting the juxtapositions of their sound upon the listener in the same way two of the band’s major influences have famously done; these being The Smiths and The Cure.
Yet, one of the albums most distinguished features has nothing to do with the music. Much like many cult albums, the American Football LP’s cover art perfectly captures in visual terms the sonic experience on offer — emulating seminal alternative albums such as My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division. For music journalist Joe Goggins ‘the connection in this instance is that the record sounds like it could only have been made in small-town America, and that photograph looks as if it could only really have been taken in similar surroundings’. Much like the music, the cover is stripped back, literally a picture of a suburban house in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.
The photograph (by Chris Strong — a friend of the band) is taken from ground level, looking up at an illuminated window. Someone is home, but who? According to lead singer and guitarist Mike Kinsella ‘none of us ever actually lived in that house, it was friends of friends who lived there when we were all in school together, in Champaign’. In reality it was a friend of a friend, but symbolically the window could be inhabited by a potential lover ala Romeo and Juliet or a cursory glance up at the abode of the unattainable other.
Gaston Bachelard and The Poetics of Space
The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard discusses the phenomenological reality of the home vis-a-vis the medium of poetry in a thoroughly original and often beautiful work called The Poetics of Space (1958). At the conclusion of the first chapter, Bachelard recounts an experience lived by the hugely influential existential poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who when walking with a couple of friends one dark night caught sight of a distant hut
The lightened casement of a distant hut, the hut that stands quite alone on the horizon before one comes to fields and to marshlands […] Despite the fact that we were very close to one another, we remained three isolated individuals seeing night for the first time (p56)
For Bachelard, the image of solitude — the single light in a distant abode — moves Rilke to a sense of isolation from his peers. Bachelard continues to state that the lit window in the distance is in essence keeping vigil on the outside world, a ‘hypnotic’ gaze which leads one ‘to dream of nothing but a solitary house in the night’, an emotional manifestation bound in the intimacy of the refuge. The lit window is a space inhabited by someone and in the case of 704 W. High St, Champaign-Urbana, it is a room in a suburban enclave south of Chicago, by all means an unexceptional space. However, it is still a space from which those on the ground are separated from. Given the lyrical content and delicate, melancholic sound of the album, those who are looking up could be craving the intimacy of the refuge within, rather than the solitude of external banishment.
According to Bachelard the house is ‘one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams for mankind’. A distinguishing feature of the album cover is the manner in which the house is photographed; the peak of the roof cuts skywards and dominates the image, it peers over the photographer, and therefore the spectator too. Bachelard notes that the imagery of the house is comprised of two connecting themes
1. A house is imagined as a vertical being. It rises upward. It differentiates itself in terms of its verticality. It is one of the appeals to our consciousness of verticality.
2. A house is imagined as a consecrated being. It appeals to our consciousness of centrality (p39)
Why is the vertical nature of a house of importance to understanding this album cover? Well, Bachelard states that his ideal house would be composed of three stories: basement, ground floor, garrett/attic. The basement is ‘first and foremost the dark entity of the house’, it is a space where during both night and day darkness prevails, and beyond its walls are nothing but earth, it is a space defined by confinement. Conversely, the attic stretches into the sky high above the ground from which it sprung. The lofty familarality of the attic results in, for Bachelard, being the space for dreamers who dream under ‘a pointed roof [which] averts rain clouds. Up near the roof all our thoughts are clear’. To be staring up at the pointed roof of the American Football house is to be looking at the intimate dream space of another, where the bedroom is ‘a vaulted room [standing] high and alone keeping watch over the past in the same way that it dominates space.’ It shines light down onto the photographer/observer, casting them into the role of solitude in the same manner as experienced by Rilke. Bachelard encompases the feeling of such desires by noting that ‘both the house and the bedchamber bear the mark of an unforgettable intimacy’.
Solitude and the Blase Attitude
An overriding feature of Rilke’s experience and Bachelard’s interpretation of it, is indeed this notion of ‘solitude’ — both the solitude of the intimate refuge/dream space of the attic and the sidewalk based observer. In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke makes his feelings clear about solitude
We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. That is all. But how much better it is to realize that we are so (1996, p238)
This acceptance of isolation from one another that Rilke advocates ties in closely to the godfather of urban sociology Georg Simmel’s notion of the blasé attitude, which was formulated the year before Rilke’s letter (1903). For Simmel, the ‘metropolitan type of man develops an organ protecting him against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment. Therefore, the ‘metropolitan man’ becomes desensitised to the world around him — he becomes blasé. Ultimately a blasé attitude results in blasé behaviour, the adoption of a mode of contact with others that is characterised by a tone of reserve and holding back that makes the formation of primary relations difficult. A method to counter the blasé attitude, is to isolate oneself from others. The sense of social solitude and isolation is a theme dealt with by American Football on their wonderfully wispy eight minute track Stay Home where Kinsella sings these lyrics:
But that’s life: it’s so social… So physical… So so-so… So emotional… So stay home
This is a song that lyrically wrestles with the idea that the best way to avoid the blase attitude of the contemporary metropolitan world is to embrace solitude, to avoid the physicality of the social and, well, stay home and find the intimacy of refuge in the familiar.
What this article has attempted to do is show through an album and in particular its cover art, the way in which solitude is manifested in urban life. The self titled American Football album is a unique artifact in the demonstration of solitude within the urban realm, it’s accidental cult following and subsequent influence upon numerous artists has shown that as a piece of music it maintains a connection with the experiences of others. Yet, these experiences are also bound in the cover art. The ‘American Football’ house and the lit window viewed from the outside is a manifestation of the desire to obtain the solitude and intimacy tied up within refuge, within a space disconnected from the blasé attitude where the heart broken can be alone and recuperate. The cover depicts a suburban house, in suburban America, it is unremarkable, ordinary, as are the subjects dealt with in the album, people fall in love and then out of love. However the combination of the visual and sonic is remarkable, they compliment each other perfectly, and thus can offer an insight into the experiences of urban solitude.
It is of interest that this album was recorded by a trio of teenagers, yet with the passing of time, their sophomore album (self titled 2) recorded fifteen years later, the cover art represents the inside of the house as its cover; perhaps the viewer on the outside eventually found intimacy in refuge.
References
Bachelard, G, 1958 (2014), The Poetics of Space, Penguin, New York
Rilke, R, M, 1996., Rilke: Poems — Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, Everyman’s Library, London
By Will Brown
Doctoral Researcher
Loughborough University
w.brown@lboro.ac.uk
