American Football were featured in the latest issue of GQ.
The “this” is the extraordinary and uncanny story of American Football, who became one of this century’s most influential rock bands in part because they no longer existed. In the weeks after Polyvinyl released the band’s album in September 1999, 21 college radio stations added its tracks to rotation—very respectable, Lunsford remembers, given that the expectations were essentially nil. But as the album seeped onto file-sharing services like Napster and Limewire, the kids who first downloaded it often bought a copy themselves. I worked in a college-town record store right as LP1 entered that growth curve, and I must have slipped hundreds of CD copies into Schoolkids Records paper bags before I finally listened and bought one myself.