Quick Before it Melts

Wednesday 30 December 2009

Defining a Decade: Wilco Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002)

It was a great story about the making of an amazing record that was also a fantastic documentary.  If you’ve never seen  I Am Trying To Break Your Heart (directed by Sam Jones) about the making of Wilco‘s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, then you’ve been missing out on the best music movies of the last 10 years.  By now it’s become legend:  the band records an album that leaves their label bosses scared, confused, and panicky.  Too weird, they say.  Band loses a member, label and band split, and the album makes it way to the band’s website, where fans cannot get enough of it and critics can’t say enough about it.  Eventually a new label comes a-callin’, a label that’s a division of their old label’s parent company.  Long story short:  Parent company pays the band for the same record twice.

It’s been a foregone conclusion for some time now that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot would be appearing on any number of similar decade best-of lists, given its place as Wilco’s defining masterpiece.  There was really very little doubt in my mind that it would be on this list, too, but the one thing I wasn’t sure of was exactly why.  It’s more than just about being a fan of the music or even the band itself.  There is an undefinable quality to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot that sets it apart from most of the albums on this list.

It finally had it’s physical release on April 23, 2002, a day after my 29th birthday.  By that point I had already heard the album many times over, but I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the physical product.  Back in 2002, music still wasn’t real to me unless I was holding it in my hand.  Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was very real, though.  It was an album that appeared to live and breathe, evolving and growing from the delicate infancy of opener “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” through to the burgeoning adolescent strum of “War on War” and the care-free young adulthood of “Heavy Metal Drummer”.  By the time “Reservations” comes ’round to close the album out, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is in its twilight moments, reflecting back on where its come from and what comes next. The album has become a friend, in a way, a comforting presence when things are going down the tubes.  A forgiving friend who doesn’t give you a hard time about ignoring it for a spell, but carries on like nothing ever happened when you come back to spending time with it.

Like its experimental counterpart, Kid A, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot represented the hope and future of music at the start of the decade.  Now at it’s close, it epitomizes the very best of the past 10 years, and will forever be remembered as the sound of the 2000s.

MP3: Wilco “Heavy Metal Drummer”
Myspace: Wilco

by J. Di Gioia | 2 Comments »

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Defining A Decade, MP3. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.