Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco

at some point or another, everything falls apart, and while there are better places to be reminded of this than while in the passenger seat of a 20 yr old VW Golf speeding down the highway, this phrase has served as an important mantra during the past 2 weeks of my life, which were experienced almost exclusively in a state of restless delirium and of which only the latter half of each day i have been conscious for. the nocturnal lifestyle i have inadvertently adopted has brought nothing but poor consequences: weird eating habits, loss of productivity, existential ennui, etc. these past summer weeks have been stained by the dread of two approaching inevitabilities: (1) the beginning of sophomore year in high school and (2) death. and while the two impending dooms looming here hopefully have vastly different timelines (hopefully), i can't help but conflate the two— combining the hopelessness of the more ultimate and the stressful urgency of the more immediate.

i hope some day, before i get too old to not realize when i chew with my mouth open¹,  i will go on more roadtrips. and without falling too far into the pit of indie blog clichés, i'd like to point out how deeply freeing it is. and it comes with a surge of patriotism— not the blind, bumper-sticker patriotism, but something closer to the hunter s. thompson side of the spectrum: an acknowledgement of the overwhelming flaws of the country, but appreciation of the staggering privilege of being an American citizen. (is that wishful thinking for hunter?)

my father, furiously overworked and yearning for the great wide open, loosens his metaphorical tie and sets out. if New Jersey is the armpit of America, allow Wisconsin to be the ear, designating Door Country, WI as the inner ear canal, a clean and pleasant gateway to the cochlea (madison; where the important stuff happens) in which waxy, bacterial residue (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) may tend to accumulate. as majestic duo: father and genderfucked child, travel northward towards social and political conservatism, they blast underrated new wave classic Remote Control by The Tubes, which skids along with them nicely down the highway. their car: dense, small, cuts through the atmosphere powered only by clean, piercing guitar riffs and that breathy sexy female vocal thing that was really big in the late 70s and early 80s.
only 2 hours in do i even dare to take Yankee Hotel Foxtrot out of its case. the ultimate melancholy introspective road trip album proves useless in the hot sun. i hold it sheepishly. i can wait.

the first time i listened to the climax of "Poor Places", the penultimate song on Wilco's sprawling 4th album, a torrential downpour hit my house². the scattered sparks of lightning proceeding grew more frequent as Jeff Tweedy and Jim O'Rourke lay creeping sheets of sound until finally the storm unleashed blankets of white noise outside my window. a striking congruence.

in rare, life-altering instances, emotional potency in music aligns with emotional potency in personal life³. when this happens, it is shattering. the power of both phenomenons— the music and the experience— amplify each other into some feedback loop of explosive passion and angst. it's fucked up. more often than not though, i'll stumble across a work of music that i know could tear me apart and make for a memorable month, but doesn't due to sheer uneventfulness. this is a weekly battle: finding music that is too emotionally potent for such an unremarkable period of time. i have a list of albums saved for future romances, break-ups, vacations, etc— something eventful enough to meet the music's standards. the first time i listened to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, i immediately added it to the list. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot deserves much more than a dull lonely claustrophobic summer. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot deserves a canvas as expansive, brimming with life, endlessly engaging as it sounds.
so when my lovely father proposes an exploratory road trip to a county neither of us have experienced, i am relieved for YHF to find a home.

the key to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's intrigue is that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a fucking trainwreck. doomed to be obliterated from the start, it opens in pieces: bits of shrapnel from the back find themselves in the front ("I'm the man who loves you..." Tweedy mumbles at the end of the first track, predicting the chorus of a later). Jeff Tweedy knows it's falling apart, and when you hear it in his voice it is heartbreaking. but i guess he's trying.
even when the band tightens up and plays it straight, it feels slightly manic and desperate. "Jesus, etc" reimagines Wilco as if they all had really bad combovers and smoked cigars— freshly post-divorced dads: they're holding themselves together, but it's a sad, sedated kind of calm. it's telling that it precedes the sleepless, hands-and-knees desolation of "Ashes of American flags."

this is a band often associated with "dad rock"⁴— the antithesis of cutting edge— making one of the most musically relevant records of the decade. O'Rourke's use of the "failing soundsystem" aesthetic feels like the logical concluding response to avant label Mego's late 90s glitch music, which used laptops to pick and tear at the seams of music: electronics molesting organic sounds, which is a primary idea exploited across YHF. similar to Fennesz, YHF's overarching musical theme is the deconstruction of music. almost every track is ripped open and mangled at some point or another. this corruption of organic sounds sounds dominant through the album even foreshadows contemporary works like Tim Hecker's Virgins, which i truly do believe sounds like YHF without the actual songs. while the early 00s were ripe for alt. rock artists to branch out & experiment with new sounds, Wilco is among the elite that did it to brilliant and devastating effect. "Poor places"'s devolution into drone is perhaps the most poignant on the album, heart-stopping, the crash at its climax: all the noise heard elsewhere piles up, traffic runs over itself, air disappears, and Tweedy is left weeping at the piano for the final track.

ok so it's not great father/daughter music fine, but it's also the perfect intersection of his dadly interests and my teen-age riotism. and it's also a rollercoaster fit for an interstate adventure and the cap of a weird summer. and god damn: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is one of those albums that teeters on the edge of inspiring me to create an album just as perfect and inspiring me to give up music alltogether as i will never begin to touch on anything remotely as good.

¹.schedule a lunch w/ grandpa to understand this

².i'd become accustomed to this summer's bipolarity— Chicago has proven itself entirely incapable of remaining sunny for more than 5 hours at a time, it seems, and rain, tidal, comes and goes, washing in and out throughout the day in a fucked up trade-off with the sun.

³.the most memorable in recent Asher White history is the discovery of Loveless coinciding with an aching, unrequited love experienced towards the closing of 8th grade.

⁴.to my great surprise i recently was informed my idea of dad rock (country-tinged 90s alt rock, often female sung (Jayhawks, Dixie Chicks, Aimee Mann)) differs from the general public's idea, which apparently is like 70s radio-on-while-i-build-the-new-porch hard rock. perhaps there is no greater illustration of evanston's liberal, alien disparity to the rest of america: the dads listen to lesbian country, the moms listen to Andrew Bird and Sufjan Stevens, the kids listen to Throbbing Gristle. and most absurd: the parents approve.

dustin hoffman writes a review

note: not the hoffman-based satire u crave. sry to disappoint. itll happen eventually. fertile ground he is. (mr. magorium's wonder emporium? are u kidding me??)

even before I pulled a muscle in my left arm I was probably unable to lift anything over 10 or 11 pounds but now that I have somewhat of a proper excuse I guess I'll let that limb just remain dormant for the rest of my life. the long term consequences of just leaving it to atrophy— a fun party trick, an excuse out of P.E., etc— easily trump slowly and painfully regaining strength there. after summer school & a slew of masturbation jokes (the most contextually-inappropriate being from my mother) i've retreated to my room to put on the record that has been spinning on both my mental and actual turntable.
i'd just like to say that I fully believe in the ignorance is bliss philosophy, as much as 7th-grade / anarcho-punk / closeted gay / borderline MRA Asher would scream NIN lyrics into her pillow at. This (relatively recently adopted) philosophy was only further embraced when last night I made the mistake of looking up images of Kevin Barnes. i was so upset by his glamour that I had to shut off my computer and listen to the album in its entirety again.

but no i know i get it. i have no right to be appalled or even surprised over the incongruity between kevin barnes' press photos and Early Four Track Recordings. EFTR is, perhaps unfortunately, not at all a proper representation of Of Montreal's aesthetic, especially not the aesthetic Mr. Barnes has adopted in the popular photos that surface— this new look is kind of a semi-ironically electro-Village-People kaleidoscope of, yeah, glamour and flamboyance and most prominently: neo-psychedelia*, which is almost entirely absent on EFTR save for a few subtly twisting guitar sounds. we're discussing separate bands kind of.

EFTR is, however, filled to the brim— overwhelmingly so, for some misguided assholes— with s 60s pop songs. what charmed me so intensely is precisely what Kevin's post-2001 press photos lack— a kind of intimate, vulnerable innocence... that sweetly southern Daniel-Johnston-cum-Bradford Cox** voice (with hints of Michael Stipe? its an Athens thing i suppose) quietly & uneasily whines about the emotional barrier of a telephone ("only lets me borrow the comforts of your voice," on one song, "a hundred times I've shook the receiver so a hint of your voice might fall out" on another) various uncomfortable and unrequited romances. Good Boy Kevin plays these songs to you in his poorly-lit bedroom while his parents are asleep in the other room.
so you can imagine my disappointment when I google his name, hoping for a picture of a modest, unassuming John Flansburgh type and instead get what id imagine the son of both Sparks members would look like

but for now I have my Kevin, Sweet Kevin, who pads his writing with tangles of traditional indie-pop— quintessential early Kindercore. the revival (or fetishization, for some misguided assholes) of 60's pop was nothing new in the late 90s— this type of unapologetic tweeness didn't just show up repeatedly during the birth of indie-pop, but was a catalyst in ethos and sound. And this record proves as a warm reminder of that music— made for and by People Just Like Me. It is welcome in my life especially during a time when the "cutting-edge" of music follows an opposite aesthetic. It is simple and human— there is little in between me and Kevin. i will play this record loud and dance in my underwear as butterfly string lights grow out of focus in the distance. i'll lay on the floor of my bedroom in the summer heat. the record's not a masterpiece. it's certainly not one-of-a-kind. but it is simple and honest. it's the soundtrack to a high school summer!!

*MGMT must've studied this photo im
mediately prior to creating the cover of their debut. Is it not embarrassing?
**also the tags in the description of the greatest indie music porno ever created

afterword:
A working title of this post was Dustin Hoffman Writes A Review but I figured it was too easy and also had probably already been done. That's all I'll say on the track titles, except that the tender innocence + absurd and childlike humor does bring to mind my favorite of the actor's roles.