Never Meant

Never Meant is a song by American emo band American Football. The opening track on the band's critically acclaimed eponymous 1999 debut LP, it is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential emo songs of all time.

Never Meant is built around a highly recognizable math rock riff played by two electric guitars in FACGCE tuning. The song's notoriety has even led it to become an internet meme, where videos are remixed so its beginning riff will unexpectedly play.

Release
American Football's self-titled debut album was released on Polyvinyl Record Co. on September 14, 1999. Initially, fans of the band were mostly fans of Cap'n Jazz, a short-lived emo band with a cult following that included American Football singer Mike Kinsella on drums. With minor success on college radio and positive word of mouth, the album formed a solid cult following in the local emo scene. Nevertheless, by the next year, the band members' college courses had ended, they no longer lived in the same city, and the band amicably disbanded.

As an inactive band with a narrow body of work, it would not have been surprising for the hype around the music to have fizzled out. However, with the advent of the internet, American Football would grow to a larger audience than Cap'n Jazz ever had. Their debut album would greatly influence the modern sound of Midwest emo music, and help popularize it from a regional genre into an international one. Features such as their twinkly math rock riffs, arpeggiated melodies, and distinctive open tunings are now some of the most defining features of the genre.

Reception
Retrospective reviews have been laudatory. Variety magazine and pop culture website Vulture both ranked Never Meant as the #1 greatest emo song of all time, with American pop culture website The Ringer ranking it as the greatest emo song of 1999.

Music videos
On June 5, 2014, a music video was released for "Never Meant". Directed by Chris Strong, the video was filmed inside and around the house that features on the album cover artwork. The video was set in Urbana, Illinois, around 1999. Strong revealed that the storyline was "about a brief relationship occurring between two characters at the end of their college experience". In December, a live video was released for "Never Meant", filmed in October at New York's Webster Hall.