Hipsters, Hippies and the Stiffhipped

Wilco’s A Ghost is Born and Artistic Expression in the Age of Consumption

originally published March 8, 2006

Whether in terms of genre, aesthetic or appeal, Wilco treads a fine line with what it represents as a band. Naysayers brand the group as an adult-contemporary act dressed up in avant-garde clothing, while Wilco’s champions claim that it is the most adventurous and exciting rock act in the country. Through 11 years and six personnel changes, the members of Wilco have transformed from alt-country pioneers, subversive pop songsmiths and sonic explorers, into their present incarnation: a mixture of rock and Americana heavily informed by the last 50 years of experimental music.

The current lineup comprises guitarist-singer Jeff Tweedy, bassist John Stirratt, drummer-percussionist Glenn Kotche, guitarist Nels Cline, sound engineer and keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen and, the most recent roster addition, multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone. Jim O’Rourke, whose fingerprints show up on a prodigious variety of contemporary music, produced both their last two studio albums, 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and 2004’s A Ghost is Born, and has had an equal hand in shaping Wilco into the unique and provocative act it is now.

The release of each of these two albums brought claims that Wilco’s shifting identity alienates older fans in the process of acquiring new ones. If, say, one were able to survey the types of shoes worn by the audience members of any Wilco show here in the Southeast (shoes being a fairly reliable means of asserting and ascertaining social collectivity), you would probably get a mix of tasseled loafers and New Balances, All-Stars and retro Asics, Birkenstocks and bare feet (at least at Bonnaroo). Wilco’s continual reinvention has given it a broad appeal and a fluid fanbase, making its live shows a melting pot of many groups that would, more or less, probably not commingle under normal social circumstances. Though these groups may project different ideals on and harbor different expectations from Wilco, that the band’s appeal transcends such social pretenses may prove to be its most promising and powerful asset.

Questions of identity and individuality reside at the heart of A Ghost is Born, which combines some of Wilco’s most complex and abrasive music with moments of pop bliss. Ghost received the most initial success of any previous release, debuting at no. 8 on the Billboard charts (Wilco’s highest spot to date) and winning two Grammys, including “Best Alternative” album. Some critics, however, responded to the album with more ambivalence than Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which saw almost universal acclaim, accusing Ghost of lacking focus and coherence. From the 10-plus minutes of the motorik-driven, Neu!-esque “Spiders (Kidsmoke),” to the guitar chaos that finishes off “At Least That’s What You Said,” Ghost is definitely Wilco’s most stylistically intrepid album, but this should not overshadow the thematic consistency and production aesthetic forming the album into a coherent whole.

Compared to the insulated, mechanical precision and “sound for sound’s sake” aesthetic of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, A Ghost is Born is an organic exploration into space, clutter, silence and discord, treating them all with equal reverence (and often in the same song). The instruments speak using their natural voices, unadorned with the digital augmentation present of YHF. Piano notes resound deeply and delicately, snare drums are crisp and textured, and bass drums exhale tight, controlled breaths. Even the nine minutes of electrometallic drones and signal searches that arise out of the structural decay of the ironically titled “Less than You Think” (sounds supposedly imitating Tweedy’s chronic migraines) retains an AM frequency warmth similar to the dronescapes La Monte Young produced with the Dream Syndicate in the 1960s.

The album’s title is a play off of the phrase “A star is born.” This word switch - which shifts the phrase’s meaning from signifying both an explosive ascent into fame and the emergence of something able to generate its own light, to instead signify the birth of something translucent, phantasmal and stuck between two planes of existence - provides a haunting analogy for the darker side of fame in contemporary culture. In “Handshake Drugs,” Tweedy explains that, “It’s okay for you to say / what you want from me / I believe that’s the only / way for me to be / exactly what you want me to be,” but later asks, “Exactly what to you want me to be?” Here he reminds us that the personas and projections given as public objects are not only based on illusions, but that lying behind these projections are actual, vulnerable human beings trying to cope with this internal divide, an imperative idea in a culture where the boundaries between private lives and public personas are becoming increasingly blurry.

A Ghost is Born also documents an attempt to find reconciliation between creativity and commerce in a culture invested in branding, commodifying, and marketing art. “Company in My Back” conjures images of the artist as ventriloquist’s dummy, speech dependent on corporate publicity and creativity stifled by legal morass: “I move so slow, a steady crushing hand / Holy shit there’s a company in my back.” Wilco treads the unstable intersection between the art and the market like no other band, as proven with its well-documented legal battles with record companies, as well as the members’ outspoken support for updating current copyright law to better adapt to the potential of cyberspace. The band’s commercial success, despite regularly allowing EPs and live shows to be available for listening and free downloading on-line, has made them a touchstone for file sharing advocates carving out a legal domain with little precedence.

Besides the supposedly compromising effects of commercial demands on artistic intent, another theme materializing within Ghost is communication. The last track on the album, “Late Greats,” concerns the fictitious band of the same name whose song “Turpentine” is the “greatest lost track of all time.” Tweedy sings, “The best song will never get sung / The best life never leaves your lungs / So good, you won’t ever know / I never hear it on the radio / Can’t hear it on the radio.” A superficial listen might present a formulaic rock song proclaiming that only obscure and under-the-radar acts are worthy of praise. But, if taken as an ode to the ineffable forms of artistic ideals, the song becomes an interesting statement about the limitations of artistic expression in contemporary society. The “greatest song” ever written is, in itself, an impossibility. For any song, once written and accentuated, is open to misrepresentation, criticism or failure. And once released, it will be subject to further mediation like advertising and marketing, and, therefore, destined to become only an apparition of what was originally intended. The “greatest song” can only exist outside of these things, in the purity of intent.

Turpentine, an organic solvent used to strip paint or to take off a veneer or exterior finish, may prove to be the key to unlocking the album. Wilco has admitted that, lyrically and musically, Ghost is its most political album yet. In these terms, Ghost’s extended and fractured guitar solos (another minor, but common, gripe about the album) take on new significance if thought of as extensions of the lyrical content or as another attempt at putting form to ineffable sentiments. Furthermore, Wilco is one of the few bands whose fanbase draws equally from both the left and the right, politically speaking, and in this sense, the band might be thought of as a social solvent, able to dissolve cultural or political barriers by uniting people in the pleasure of experiencing live music, if only for the extent of the performance.

Despite what we may want it to be, Wilco stands as a band pushing boundaries and making the music its members want to make. But what’s more these guys retain their artistic integrity through making the effort to ensure that their art, once released into the world, is made available to speak to you in whatever capacity it may, no matter what type of shoes you choose to wear.

Nick Hasty The Wilco show on Thursday, Mar. 9 at the Classic Center is sold out.

Nick Hasty

The Wilco show on Thursday, Mar. 9 at the Classic Center is sold out.