(t5!) Heroes Of The Zeroes Albums: #09: Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002)

Country music, in its most unadulterated form, is supposed to contain a definite emotional sensation. Whether it’s the technique the guitars are strummed, the unmistakable twang, or the connection it has to an older, more romantic Americana, country as a genre is capable of enfolding an amazing amount of emotion into relatively uncomplicated melodies and honest, unpretentious lyrics. With a commitment to lose all their alt-country accessories in Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Jeff Tweedy and his band Wilco has had to come up with other ways to retain the level of emotion. So Tweedy embraced a new tone: Wilco with a more mournful, vulnerable, and unsure voice. This left skeptics shockingly skeptical because Tweedy had very rare moments of uncertainty. If you’re familiar with his work before Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, he had shown that confidence is never been a thing he lacked—both evident in Summer Teeth, where his guitars showed the crunch, and in the double album Being There, where he showed his intrepidness.

About with YHF being labeled as “experimental”, the last time I checked, you would need to be pretty not unsure to perform experiments in the world of music. Everyone has heard the back-story behind the album by now: it has been delayed for over a year because of problems with the label. Warner Music’s Reprise Records didn’t want to pick it up, regarding all the songs as not suitable for commercial release—“too experimental,” they say. Well, for one thing, experimental records—like Kid A, for instance—have garnered commercial success in the past. For two things, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is as experimental as a papier-mache volcano in a science fair. Sure, it relies on production and studio tricks, more heavily than Wilco’s past albums did, but the same thing can be said about hundreds of albums released in the zeroes. Wilco’s fourth album is an accumulation of straightforward, evocative pop songs, plain and simple.

Then, there was the way the tracks blend together, reveled by both critics and audiences when YHF was released in 2002. A few masterfully engineered production gimmicks gave the album a cohesiveness and progression that did not show up on past Wilco’s records. Notice the way “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” deteriorates in its final minutes, foreshadowing the moments that will come eventually in the album. Now foreshadowing seems like a technique more commonly used in works of a David Simon or an M. Night Shyamalan, but it rarely finds its place on albums due to the narrative design they seldom aspire to. So the importance of the album’s track construction that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has...well…let’s just say the album won’t lose quality if you hit the “shuffle” button.

However, all of these things surrounding Yankee Hotel Foxtrot—new alt-country, label wars, experimental, album structure, Jeff Tweedy being an indie hero—are actualities that don’t exactly hold a musical significance. That’s a testament of the power of zeroes media: all of these stories and reports perpetuated by the Internet made YHF a mythical being. If YHF were a more current release, it probably would’ve ranked higher in this list. Nevertheless, the fact that eight years or so has passed now and all that nonsense that surround it come off and we can listen to it soberly for what it really is and it’s still ranked ninth? That’s a testament to how awesome these songs are: the way Tweedy’s voice withers into feedback in “Reservations”, the fusion of organic and technological appeal in the aforementioned “I Am Trying To Break My Heart”, the playfulness of “Heavy Metal Drummer”, the metallic percussions in “Kamera”, the fragility of “Radio Cure”, the eeriness of “Jesus, Etc.” (y’know, if it was actually written BEFORE 9/11). Tweedy and Wilco may not be indie heroes but they certainly are heroes of the zeroes.