| Some rough memories of this record
and these times...Details can be read nearby. Of Big Stars and preconceived notions: The Last Temptation of Jeff Tweedy Four days ago I got my hands on this record – Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot – which, despite an official release date of four days from now, everyone else has already heard (a rather long, bordering-on-mythological tale that involves a record company rejecting the record, Wilco fighting for the ownership of the music and ultimately winning, then uploading it for download onto the band web-site – a messy tale indeed). Four days ago I never planned on listening to one record for four days straight – non-stop, endlessly, relentlessly, exhaustingly. (What is it with this number four? Four days ago receiving this record; four days from now it will be released; it is the band Wilco’s fourth ‘proper’ record. Why this peculiar number - four?) I may have been the only one who, up ‘til now, hadn’t already heard even a scant moment of YHF - the Luddite motherfucker that I am. But I just can’t ever get around to downloading music (I know, I know, I’d better get with it and fast, the future and all…I’ve heard it a million times…but it isn’t a matter of principles, it’s, well somewhat it’s principle, but it is mostly because I just feel like something’s missin’ if I hear music belching outta my computer). But I had heard all of the praise. You’d have to have been deaf, dumb, and blind not to have (and even then, I swear to God, some rock-crit clown would have done something, anything he or she could have, to tell you all about it). This record, this set of tunes dubbed as overly non-commercial by folks who are in the commerciality biz – To tell you the truth, not only do we not hear any commercially viable songs on here," says the waxed back hair record exec, "We don’t even hear any commercials on this thing. You know, like…like…like, who’s that whale guy, that…that..." "Moby?" "Yes! Exactly, like that Moby kid. Or that fella from the Police, that Bono…" "You mean Sting I believe" "Yes! That’s him, that Stink fella. Now they had commercials in them!" A stunned Tweedy sips the last drops from a styrofoam coffee cup, stands, straightens his jeans, smoothes his t-shirt, and heads out the door expecting his record is going with him. - has had more advance notice than a Doppler tracked Midwest summers’ thunderstorm. So I set myself up, cynically indeed, to be disappointed when I’d finally gotten my hands on the release. If everyone else were lining the streets for the hero’s parade, well I was gonna be the guy to spot the storm clouds – and the one who pointed them out, with an asshole’s grin. Why listen then? Why even bother if you’re gonna go right on into the whole deal with this asshole’s approach of being a contrarian for contrary’s sake? Because, you see, that is what I do. "It’s art," a friend admonished when I’d told him a few months back that I refused to download the record. "It’s damn good art too!" I winced. ‘Art’, as a musical adjective, always makes me cringe. It always has. As far back as I can recall I’d had a problem with the term ‘art’ – although I’d never had any debatable reasoning as to why. I’d just toss around some moot mumbo jumbo about paintings and sculptures being ‘art’ and then sneer and hrrumpf for assertive effect. Hardly the stuff of reasonable contemplation let alone a sensible or defensible dismissal of the description. Hrumpf! Sneer! Ah! But alas, whilst reading the estimable LeRoi Jones on "Bop" in his tome-de-force Blues People I found my answer. Bemoaning the labeling of Bop jazz as "art" in the 1940’s, Jones hrumpfs: "The music by the mid-forties had also begun to get tagged with that famous disparagement art," parenthetically adding, "meaning superfluous, rather than something that makes it important that you are a human being." I had my answer/argument! And I didn’t have to come up with it myself! So, skeptical of Wilco as I was, I was more than happy to sanction the disparagement of "art" to my colleague who was excited by the possibility that this truly was art. It was a lofty perch that I sincerely hoped he’d be prepared to tumble down from as he read my opinion of his beloved ‘art’.
Excerpts from a wife’s "things for her husband to do" list, as posted on a refrigerator door 4/20/02:
There’s a divulgence of guilt in that list somewhere. I admit it. I’d been listening to this new Wilco record steadily – and not merely under the guise of "reviewing" it for the local rag anymore (which, as an aside, seems to have ended badly. An editor at said pub damn near demanded that I add an absurd codifying description of Wilco that went a little like this: "an Americana band - meaning a rootsy blend of pop, rock, and country" Dear God! Is this what we have come to in the print world today?) Somewhere along the way to my slaying of the Wilco myth I’d stumbled onto a very uneasy feeling: not an executioners remorse really, but rather the confounding discovery of truth. While working my way through Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, listening repeatedly for those holes that I knew were there, somewhere, I’d begun hearing the faint echoes of something that sounded…that sounded…well, pretty fucking good. I’d even started to think that what I was hearing was beyond good and well into the realm of great. But how? That’s what I wanted to know. I’d loved the bands straightforward rootsy rock of the post Uncle Tupelo hangover A.M. I was excited about the bands second record, Being There, but not nearly as excited as everyone else seemed to get. As good as its best moments were, its not-so-good moments weighed things down on a double album that was a record to long. So, while my initial excitement over the band waned when they did that Mermaid Ave Guthrie stuff with bloke Billy Bragg (which, as wise as Guthrie could sound, felt too damn musty to me) it completely sagged when Summerteeth shook the pop sands from Brian Wilson’s sandals. That was the record on which Wilco’s work started to sound like LeRoi Jones’ ‘art’ to me. At the end of "I am trying to break your heart", the opening cut on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, there is a persistent construction site noise hovering over the remnants of the song. The racket had been building since the songs inception - like the morning worksite crew slowly getting their coffee down, hardhats on, belts tightened, and one by one getting to work. Over the din a voice yells out causing everyone to pause…they’ve heard something - a voice – and it sounds pained. "Disposable Dixie cup drinker / I assassin down the avenue / I’m hiding out in the big city blinkin’ / what was I thinkin’ when I let go of you" it sounds like, but no one can be sure. A co-worker in peril? A passerby-er trying to converse with a friend over the noise? The voice aches enough for everyone to notice, but only for a moment. ‘It’s nothing’ they all tell themselves, and they set about their noise making again. Another voice follows, perhaps the same one, but now no longer pained, sounding resigned. "Was you," it almost sounds like, "oh how the man loves you." Then a short burst of noise, and silence. The end. But, of what? It’s a high moment, and it comes right out of the YHF’s gate. That voice – the pained and distant sounding one - is the point of departure for me. I became entirely and, much to my chagrin, inexplicably engaged by the record right then and there. But it wasn’t until the quick and easy pop approach of the second tune, "Kamera (a welcome breather book-ended by the records two most exhausting introspective studies), gives way to "Radio cures" that I’d not only fallen into lock-step with the others in the Praise Be To Wilco Communion and Choir, but I’d also made the revelatory discovery that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is nothing less than the slightly more stable and affable younger sibling of Big Star’s (Alex Chilton’s) 3rd/Sister Lovers. **At this point, 1400 words into this thing – double the requested length of my alt-weekly requested effort – I have to issue an apology: I was on a journey you see, when I wrote that piece, and this record is far more dense than any four-days-and-a-deadline can allow for. So for my ‘other’ review, while the words said what I meant and I did mean exactly what I said, I apologize. However, I do not deal in the realm of rating/grading systems for records, the people I work for do, so I was required to give this record a rather (I now realize) misguided "B". And for that, I am truly sorry. Now, about that Big Star thing… The third record by cult icons Big Star has long been hailed as a masterstroke of meltdown. It is a recording full of breakdowns, incapacitation, and resignation. It’s a document that devours its own angst and rails along rather accepting of its pain. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot isn’t quite all of that, but it is as deeply human (ah! Thus, not an ‘art’ record!) and wholly introspective. It is, as was 3rd/Sister Lovers, an introspective work that is a study in self-analyisis and discovery that, as real life is apt to do, leaves no answers. Both records are firmly rooted in the journey, the getting-there, being the only possible answer – never believing in absolutes. So both records tend to stay in motion: highs barrel rapidly into lows, smiles turn to tears, and tears to joy. But where 3rd/Sister Lovers comes to dark and pessimistic conclusions, YHF remains acutely optimistic. As Chilton sinks into a near-despondent loneliness, Tweedy surveys his psyche and, despite the obvious hints of darkness, concludes that it isn’t all that bad to be alive. "I’ve just been broken / my heart is wrapped in ice" he sings in "Poor Places", "my fangs have been pulled / but I really wanna see you tonight." It’s enough to rattle your bones, and in the end, that’s the point. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, unlike its cantankerous older sib, is ultimately a record about love, about loves power – both good and bad. And while Chilton found love to be such shit that it wasn’t worth the pain, Tweedy finds a very human understanding of its power and embraces it – flaws and all: "How can I convince you its me I don’t like? Not be so indifferent to the look in your eyes?" Tweedy muses in the starkly beautiful confession in "Reservations, "I’ve always been distant, and I’ve always told lies…I’m bound by these choices - so hard to make. I’m bound by the feelings so easy to fake. None of this is real enough to take me from you. I’ve got reservations about so many things but not about you." The song closes out Yankee Hotel Foxtrot perfectly and honestly. Life (and therefore love) is flawed, and in between the simpler giddy moments ("Kamera"), the longing reminiscences ("Heavy metal drummer"), and the swaggering false confidences ("I’m the man who loves you") come the sucker punches. And the key to it all, as Tweedy seems to discover, lies in the learning to roll with them. "Crazy," Angelo Dundee once said when asked his initial reaction to Muhammed Ali’s rope-a-dope strategy against the bigger, stronger George Foreman in Zaire, 1974. Dundee then smiled, recalling perhaps the magnificence of Ali laying back against the ropes as the vicious behemoth Foreman punched himself exhausted, and said, "crazy beautiful." Crazy beautiful…crazy beautiful…it is exactly what Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is all about. Crazy beautiful is exactly what Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is. |