“It scares me”: The 2008 Kings of Leon song that predicted modern America
Kings of Leon is the sort of heartwarming success story of a band that a country like America would pride itself on.
As a band made up of three brothers, Caleb, Nathan, and Jared Followill, as well as their cousin Matthew, all of whom grew up under the religious stewardship of the Followill brothers’ father, Ivan Leon, who was a travelling Pentecostal preacher, they were seemingly America’s rich conservative values in a rock and roll band.
They could surely grab the torch from Lynyrd Skynyrd and keep the Star-Spangled Banner flying high through global art. Their sound certainly hinted at as such. Crunching blues riffs paired with gravelly vocal tones was a match made in heaven, and suddenly, the modern music landscape was once again alive with the echoes of bluegrass ringing through the charts.
But then came their seminal album Only By The Night in 2008. ‘Sex On Fire’ and ‘Use Somebody’ would take them to dizzying heights of fame, long from the humble origins of say ‘The Bucket’. And so this success story gave credence to the idea of the American dream, and their compatriots proudly watched them take over the world. That was until they got to ‘Crawl’, the second track on the album, which, in fact, served as a brutal takedown of their home country.
Frontman Caleb Followill explained that the band used the record to deliver their first political anthem, and ‘Crawl’ was it.
“It honestly feels as if America has to learn how to crawl again before it can walk tall,” he added, “In [biblical] prophecy, it says at the end of days there will be wars and rumours of wars. Look at all the hurricanes and earthquakes and everything that’s going on, to me it’s almost like what has been done in America has brought on the feeling of a religious war, and along with that, a lot of other prophecies are coming to pass. It scares me.”
Their early success as a band exposed them to the realities of their own country. As soon as Kings of Leon released music and the band hit the road to tour it, they were confronted with the subtle hypocrisy of their own patriotism. Because while so much of American music channels the intersection of religious and national pride, Kings of Leon used it to highlight how problematic their global position was.
He explained, “I think that just came from us being a band that pretty much grew up in Europe, and we couldn’t really enjoy the success that we had because every time we went to a restaurant, everyone looked at us like we were these people that came from a country that supported war and supported all the terrible, terrible decisions and mistakes that were goin’ on in America.”
This was in ‘08, when America was embroiled in a seemingly endless war with Iraq. But it’s more concerning how it’s grown with each decade, for now two of them on, it seems more on the nose than it’s ever been. In the reprise of the record, Followill warns that the bloody damage has resulted in hell making its way towards us, and just under 20 years on from its release, it feels as though it’s loudly arrived.
