My Own Worst Enemy
"Can we forget about the things I said when I was drunk?" Lit's hangover apology rode a staccato octave riff to eleven weeks at number one on Billboard's Modern Rock chart in 1999 and finished as the year's most-played modern rock song. It is still on rock radio, still at karaoke, and still getting credited to Blink-182.
Lit came out of Orange County, California, where guitarist Jeremy Popoff and bassist Kevin Baldes had met and started playing together in 1986. Jeremy's brother A. Jay sang, Allen Shellenberger drummed, and the band cycled through the names Razzle and Stain before discovering the latter was taken and settling on Lit. Their first album, Tripping the Light Fantastic, came out in April 1997 on the small Malicious Vinyl label, which lost its national distribution soon after; that let the band out of its contract, and after months of showcasing they signed with RCA in 1998.
"My Own Worst Enemy" was the first thing most people heard from them. Jeremy Popoff described it as "the result of waking up and realizing you screwed up the night before," and A. Jay called it "the combination of many, many incidents," adding that he recorded the vocal naked in the studio. RCA serviced it to radio in January 1999, ahead of the album A Place in the Sun, which arrived on February 23 on RCA and the band's own Dirty Martini imprint, produced by Don Gilmore. The single entered Billboard's Modern Rock chart, hit number one on April 10 and spent eleven weeks on top, crossed to number six on Mainstream Rock, and peaked at 51 on the Hot 100 in July. It ended the year as the chart's number-one song and took the Modern Rock Track of the Year award at the 1999 Billboard Music Awards; the album reached number 31 and was platinum by October.
The video, shot by Gavin Bowden at the Java Lanes bowling alley in Long Beach, put the band in 1970s outfits, and the band became regulars on TRL. Lit played Woodstock '99, toured with the Offspring, Garbage and No Doubt, did the Warped Tour, and followed up with "Zip-Lock," whose video featured Blink-182, and "Miserable," whose video featured Pamela Anderson. Jeremy Popoff even turned up on MTV Cribs.
The song outlived the band's moment by a wide margin. It has been called both an essential pop-punk track (NME) and one of the genre's great one-hit wonders (Fuse), it is routinely misattributed to Blink-182 and misnamed "Please Tell Me Why," and it went double platinum in May 2020, twenty-one years after release. In 2023 Billboard ranked it the 21st most successful song in the 35-year history of its alternative airplay chart. Shellenberger died of brain cancer in 2009; the band kept going, and the riff kept getting requested.
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