The Best of the Decade - #2: Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot - Wilco

The placement on the End of the Decade list for Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. For all intents and purposes, I've been heralding it as the greatest album of the decade for about as long as its songs have been bouncing back and forth throughout my head. Though there are probably a lot of naysayers, I personally believe that, if any record is deserving of the top spot, it may as well be this one. Sure, it lacks the recreation that Radiohead underwent in the process of creating Kid A, but Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is, by all means, just as much a record born of the downfall of the music industry as we knew it, at the time.

The album also built itself it's own personal mythos: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was originally scheduled to be released September 11th, 2001. However, after the album had been completed, fully and wholly, Reprise Records' president was fired in the AOL and Time Warner merger. Howie Klein, the president, was a massive supporter of the band, and after he left, record execs began doing what they seem to be famous for and started making demands, complaining that the album lacked any songs worthy of a single or wide radio play. After the band failed to deliver, Reprise dropped Wilco, and after a small legal battle, gave the rights to the completed record over to the band. The album was then sold to Nonesuch Records, which just so happen to be a smaller subsidiary of AOL Time Warner, Reprise's parent company. In essence, as Jeff Tweedy points out in the film I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco, AOL Time Warner paid for the album twice.

Still, Yankee Hotel is worth every penny of the money poured into it by the two record labels, and then some. Beginning with a piano and an acoustic guitar, frontman Jeff Tweedy sings the album opener, "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart," as though every last inch of him is soaked in as much liquor as he could legally get his hands on. "I am an American aquarium drinker/I assassin down the avenue." He doesn't merely walk, or saunter, he assassins. Playing as a breakup song in reverse, Tweedy croons his cryptic love song, telling a former lover "What was I thinking when I let go of you?"

Two songs later in the moody strum of "Radio Cure," Tweedy reprises his gin-soaked whine with lines as simple as "Oh, distance has no way of making love understandable," but as sweepingly confusing as "Picking apples for the kings and queens of things I've never seen." "Radio Cure" is, to me, the finest demonstration on the record of how to adequately create murk; the minutiae of the looming drum beat and the thick piano and guitar, boiling into a stew, with no better word in sight. Static crackles around Tweedy's Southern drawl, as he sings of "electronic surgical words" and how "there is something wrong with me." The song ends just as it began, with him pleading, "Cheer up honey, I hope you can."

Jeff Tweedy builds a kind of drunken philosophy in the repetitions found in the record, the best example of which being the fantastically juxtaposed next song, "War on War." The chorus twangs with perfect nonsense: "You have to learn to die/if you want to want to be alive." On "Ashes of American Flags," the chorus bleeds with the same blue blood: "All my lies are always wishes/I know I would die if I could come back new." The brilliance that oozes from every pore of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is that which bled from an album in the same way as Death Cab for Cutie's unspoken masterpiece We Have The Facts and We're Voting Yes did: the entirety of the album is lyrics that you wish you had thought of first, and probably did, but forgot to write down. While on the latter, Ben Gibbard sang "We spread out and occupied the cracks in the urban streets," Tweedy sings "If I could, you know I would hold your hand and you'd understand, I'm the man that loves you" on "I'm the Man That Loves You," or, with the first verse of album closer "Reservations," "How can I convince you it's me I don't like/And not be so indifferent to the look in your eyes/When I've always been distant/And I've always told lies for love." The words are put together in a way that, when you think to yourself, "I want to write like that," you just come up with lyrics that he's already written.

In the slow-building gem "Poor Places," Tweedy reveals that he is certainly aware of everything I've said: that he's a bit of a lush, and his words have been pulled from the everything: "There's bourbon on the breath/Of the singer you love so much/He takes all his words from the books/That you don't read anyway." As the song builds, and even the siren roar of the guitars can't drown out that cryptic and ethereal voice ("Poor Places" includes a sample of a song from The Conet Project, a collection of transmissions from shortwave numbers stations, of a woman repeating the phonetic code Yankee Hotel Foxtrot), you understand that Jeff Tweedy isn't a liar, or a fake, or a drunk, or any of the things you think he is, or even that he thinks he is. Tweedy is merely a man who has made a lot of poor decisions with himself, has loved and lost, has gone crazy and regained his sanity, all in a fraction of a fraction of a second. "Poor Places" and "Reservations" are the end to a fever dream, one that began to grow in "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" and just never ceased until the woman stopped repeating those three words.

Or maybe I'm a liar. "I'm not gonna get caught calling a pot kettle black," he says in "Pot Kettle Black," the song just before "Poor Places." He might be a liar and a drunk, after all. However, he may be such a good liar, he's convinced you that he's a bad liar, so you think he's just a good man. Who knows. The real truth lies in lyrics like those in the dramatically underrated "Jesus, Etc.": "You were right about the stars, each one is a setting sun." Jeff Tweedy may very well be the world's best songwriter, and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot proves that. However, you just can't really be sure if he just made the whole thing up.

For those interested in Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and the backstory of the album, you can download the album here, the film here, and the entirety of The Conet Project here. You can learn more about The Conet Project here (wiki) and here (website), and are encouraged to wrap yourself up in the eerie mystery of it.

The Best of the Decade - #1: Radiohead - Kid A

Kid A - Radiohead

To begin talking about Kid A, one has to go back to 1997, the year Radiohead really stepped away from the behemoth they created with “Creep,” and took on a new form as a band that was able to spin lyrics about post-apocalyptic society into rock anthems with OK Computer. In the wake of said album, the band began to feel the strain of super-stardom, a topic merely skimmed in the film Meeting People is Easy, which showed the beginnings of Thom Yorke’s reclusive nature, and his will to escape their angsty pop hit. To make matters worse, in an attempt to escape the limelight of a song as anthemic as “Loser” by Beck, he had unwittingly made what is constantly referred to as the best of (or in the midst of the best) the 90s. What do you do when you accidentally make yourself a darling of the music community at large, whilst trying to get people to leave you the fuck alone?

The answer, Yorke thought, was to simply start over from the ground up. Being the leader of the band, he held the most sway, and managed to re-build the entire makeup and sound of the band, and, utilizing the new business structure that the media had created (releasing small blips in between shows on stations like MTV), released Kid A, an album so far removed from the sound of the band’s first three albums, that the only thing tying them all together was Thom Yorke’s instantly recognizable falsetto.

If OK Computer was the world of tomorrow, Kid A was the world in the day after tomorrow. The album starts with the mellow synth of “Everything in its Right Place,” with its quiet repeating lyrics that are seemingly about nothing (“Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon,” “There are to colors in my head/what was that you tried to say?”), and segueing gently into the one-part lullaby of the title track and its distorted-into-nothing vocals. “I slipped on a little white lie,” you make over the tinker of the keyboard and the slight hum of the drums. It slowly builds, as the voice sings “We’ve got heads on sticks/and you’ve got ventriloquists,” and you feel as though something may very well be in the process of being born here.

You abandon this quickly as the next song, “The National Anthem,” begins, with grungy and distorted bass and a squealing horn section: Yorke’s de facto anthem for his fictional nation. “Everyone has got the fear/it’s holding on/turn it off!” he pleads as everything groans around him, as the trumpets get louder, the ice caps melt, and everything boils around him. The horns finally give way after that which was in utero in “Kid A” is born, and Radiohead marks themselves as the new parents of this new noise, blending the words of old with the sounds of new, blending into this child of quiet, claustrophobic wrath.

The child has it’s first epiphany when everything gives way into “How To Disappear Completely,” and all there is is a quiet guitar. “I’m not here, this isn’t happening,” he croons, sounding to be on the verge of tears. “How To Disappear Completely” proves to be the most telling and affecting song on the album, stepping away from the whole of everything up to this point to say, “That there, that’s not me.”

On a purely lyrical basis, the album is somehow nothing to write home about, at least not at first. However, after awhile, songs like “Optimistic” seem to seep into your psyche, with the song’s refrain of “You can try the best you can, the best you can is good enough” becoming a positive affirmation, whereas the apocalyptic disco of “Idioteque” and it groans and cracks, the whole while Yorke’s chanting grows louder, singing, “We’re not scare mongering, this is really happening” and “Who’s in the bunker?/Women and children first.” Yorke seemed to, in the three years between OK Computer and Kid A, discover how to perfectly convey every screaming emotion in the most simple ways he can, proven in likely the most sorrowful break-up song in existence, “Motion Picture Soundtrack.”

The drum machines and synths that have been bursting and blooming over the course of the albums, growing in “Treefingers,” the album’s instrumental interlude, come back to earth during the horrors of everyday life brought to the forefront in “Morning Bell.” More a tone poem than a song, Yorke outlines a normal suburban life falling to pieces, split down the middle (“Cut the kids in half” “Where’d you park the car?/Clothes are on the lawn with the furniture”), it demonstrates a new world much like that discussed with “ice age coming” in “Idioteque,” it shows the birth of this cold dead place: the death of the family.

The album closes with the haunting organs of “Motion Picture Soundtrack.” In many ways, the song is one of the most sorrowful on the album, if not one of the most sorrowful by the band to date. Yorke barely sings on the song; he croons in the same way he did in “How To Disappear Completely.” When he sings “Red wine and sleeping pills, help me get back to your arms/Cheap sex and sad films, help me get back where I belong,” you wonder if the whole of Kid A up to this point has been the world created in the mind of the man singing this song, a world that has fallen into complete destruction, all because of the “you” in the first line of the song. In the second verse, joined by the sounds of bells, he lets go the most gripping and tearful line on the record: “Stop sending letters. Letters always get burned. It’s not like the movies that fed us on little white lies,” bringing us back to the little white lie he slipped on in “Kid A.” The album closes with one final, sorrowful blow: “I will see you in the next life.”

What makes Kid A such a beautiful album is not the fact that it was a masterwork for a band that had exploded because of their mastery of your guitar and the apocalypse to come, it’s how beautifully they portray that the end of the world doesn’t have to be brought upon by nuclear war or global warming, it could be because of the loss of someone (or something) important. In the verse left out of the final version of “Motion Picture Soundtrack, after the second verse, he delivers the payload that is the key to the album: “Beautiful angel, torn apart at birth/Limbless and helpless, I can barely recognize you.” This creature that was born of noise was the product of extreme sorrow, and because part of its soul had been destroyed, which (and I can’t state this enough) is a fate worse than the looming destruction of the world. It’s the destruction of a life as that life knows it.

For all the dystopian imagery that Thom Yorke puts into his lyrics, be it “2+2=5” from Hail to the Thief or the computerized speech of OK Computer’s “Fitter Happier,” he managed to spin all of that into a deeply moving love letter to love lost with Kid A, in a way that would never truly make you think it was anything but a vision of chemical warfare. It could be said that, in the time after OK Computer, while Yorke was being heckled into tears by screaming fans demanding to hear “Creep,” he became something more than a man with a guitar. He became a shell, and Kid A was a time-lapse piece of that shell being recreated in the image of something else, something entirely indistinguishable from the thing before it. It’s tragic that it happened, but it ended up being one of the most haunting things the new millennium had to offer, and it was proof that it was, truly, going to be alright, and that everything was in its right place.

Further listening: Kid A can be downloaded here, while the film discussed in this article, Meeting People is Easy, can be found here. For those seeking something different, Kid 17, a curious sync-up in which each song re-starts and overlaps with the song 17 seconds in, can be found here.

The Best of the Decade - An Introduction

There are lists that every record reviewer loves to write: “Top five songs for a rainy day.” “The best songs to get over a break-up.” “Twenty songs to start a Monday.” But there is one kind of list that nobody relishes doing: the best of the _____. The best of the year can be enjoyable, provided your December involves re-listening to everything and not, as the case is whenever the last week rolls around for me, a mad dash to take in everything you were too stubborn to put down because you just simply didn’t want to stop listening to that Parenthetical Girls album. But, there is one point that I can’t imagine anyone who writes about music, for fun or for profit, enjoys: the end of the decade.

And so here we are, in the 8th month of 2009, meaning that the time has (technically) come, to discuss what was really, really good in the last ten years. Gee, wasn’t Yankee Hotel Foxtrot magnificent, or what about Agaetis Byrjun? And what about Kid A? How exactly does one simply put an album like White Blood Cells over Chutes Too Narrow, or, if you aren’t on the Pitchfork writing staff, De-Loused in the Comatorium? In the end, you’ll just spend too much time pulling out your hair, trying to figure out if Picaresque really does belong in a spot higher than Bitte Orca, and you’ll look at the clock, it'll be 2011, and you'll go, “Now what was I doing again?”

I am someone who will inevitably try and establish some sort of record hierarchy for the decade, but, and this is going to sound very silly, it just isn’t fair. The albums that people refer to as “the best of (insert large time span here)” are the ones that stay with you in 20 years time, the kind of records that you get in bar fights over and you sacrifice the car to keep in a nasty divorce. It’s unfair to say that you liked Boys & Girls in America more, even though “Citrus” and “First Night” didn’t make you cry as much as every single time you heard “Love Love Love” or “Of Angels & Angles.”

So, it is with complete fairness that I have decided that the end of the decade should call for celebration of every album that made the decade great. It calls for a celebration of songs like “Wake Up” and “Chicago,” everything from the pop genius of “Stillness is the Move” to the fucked up disco of “Idioteque,” and everywhere in between. It is my intent to discuss these albums, and why they remain so powerful and, in the end, flawless.