American Football / American Football (Lp2) / 2016
My Instincts Are the Enemy
anxious, pleading, self-lacerating
A confession of self-distrust addressed to a partner who's being dragged into the narrator's internal conflict. The song frames compulsion and self-sabotage as a kind of color-blindness, asking someone else to perceive what the speaker cannot trust himself to see.
self-destructive impulse dependency on a partner moral confusion inner conflict/civil war with self shame and warning
Who's speaking
First person confessional, addressed directly to a 'you' who is implicated in the speaker's instability; the narrator seems earnest but unreliable about his own motives, admitting damage while still asking to be trusted or interpreted for.
What happens
The song opens with a warning about the self, then escalates from vague self-distrust to admissions of appetite and malevolence, before collapsing into paralysis and a declared stalemate between self and other. It ends not with resolution but with a plea for external perception, as if only the addressee's eyes can settle what the speaker cannot.
How it's built
Built on two parallel verses that repeat the same confessional frame with escalating language (from 'damaged' to 'malevolence'), followed by a bridge that shifts from personal confession to shared consequence, using repeated conditional questions and circular phrasing to mimic the stuck, looping quality of the mental state being described.
Section by section
Opening verse
“my instincts are the enemy”
The speaker frames his own impulses as hostile forces, immediately establishing a split self rather than a unified narrator. The admission arrives as an apology issued in advance, suggesting a pattern of harm he already expects to repeat.
Color-blindness image
“reds look green to me”
This moment turns abstract self-doubt into a concrete, almost clinical image. By asking the addressee to interpret his perception, the speaker offloads responsibility for understanding himself onto someone else, which becomes a recurring move in the song.
Second verse escalation
The language intensifies from vague damage to outright malevolence, and the craving to experience everything reframes compulsion as appetite. The partner is cast less as a person and more as the only possible grounding object.
Bridge / civil war section
“paralyzed, engaged in a civil war”
Here the song stops progressing narratively and instead states the condition outright: a stalemate where any action still produces loss. Crucially the speaker extends this loss to the addressee, acknowledging collateral damage rather than isolated suffering.
Closing plea
The repeated questioning that yields an unchanged answer suggests the speaker has exhausted his own resources for self-understanding. The final request for the other person's perception is less resolution than surrender, ending the song on dependency rather than clarity.
Craft
- metaphor of color perception
- The inability to distinguish red from green stands in for moral or emotional confusion, suggesting the speaker's internal signals are miswired rather than willfully ignored.
- parallel structure
- The near-identical opening lines of each verse create a sense of ritual confession, as if the speaker is rehearsing the same warning without being able to act on it.
- war/conflict imagery
- Describing an internal split as paralysis in a civil war externalizes the psychological struggle as a divided self, with no side able to claim victory.
- circular phrasing
- The closing lines about receiving the same answer to different questions enact the feeling of being trapped in a repeating pattern, formally mirroring the content.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a song about compulsive or addictive self-destruction, using perceptual confusion as a metaphor for distorted judgment, with the partner positioned uncomfortably as both victim and lifeline. An alternative reading could frame it more narrowly as about romantic self-sabotage—an inability to stop hurting a partner despite clear warning signs—without any addiction subtext. Both readings share the same structural core: a narrator who diagnoses himself accurately but remains unable to act on that diagnosis.
Context
American Football's 2016 reunion album leans into more direct emotional confession than their original late-90s material, which tended toward more oblique, impressionistic imagery. This track fits that shift toward explicit vulnerability, though I don't have confirmed biographical details about what inspired this specific song.
Listen for
- the shift in tone between the two verses as self-description intensifies
- how the vocal delivery handles the repeated opening lines across verses
- the way the bridge's conditional language mirrors circular, trapped thinking musically
- any dynamic swell or release around the civil war/paralysis imagery
- the final plea and whether the music resolves or leaves tension unanswered
About American Football
American Football is an American midwest emo band from Urbana, Illinois, originally active from 1997 to 2000. They reformed in 2014.
1997 - present / United States
Full biography and catalogue