Though it took them a long time to make the leap from merely interesting to indisputably first-rate, Wilco have justified the wait.
Their first genuine masterpiece, 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, was a work of delicate, breathtaking beauty. The band’s sparse, silently-deafening range of sonic dynamics were worthy of prime Velvet Underground, or an Americana-drenched OK Computer.
Lest anyone suspected they’d shot their load on that one, Wilco continue to evolve into a mighty force. Kicking Television, their marathon double-disc live CD, was the best and most honest live record of 2005, from the instant of Jeff Tweedy’s hushed intonation ‘Dreamed about killin’ you again last night / And it felt alright to me.’
Increasingly political, as ‘Ashes of American Flags’ demonstrates, Wilco’s appreciation of Woody Guthrie doesn’t just extend to the sounds. They’re radical storm-the-White-House lefties, whose mainman Tweedy, reticent and not especially forthcoming on the subject of his music, can and will talk politics all day long. Like (best estimate) 50% of Americans, he’s yet to fully come to terms with the cabal of spooks currently holding the reins of power, and overflows with apologies to the rest of the globe for the way things have turned out.
”I think we (Wilco) have felt a duty to get more overtly political than we’ve ever been,” Tweedy confides. “I get dumbfounded sometimes. There’s lots of seemingly intelligent people in America supporting something that is inherently wrong.” These people are, he says, motivated by fear that America’s future position in the world is bound to be diminished. And they’re fighting tooth and nail, in terror, to hold on to what they have.
“They don’t want to give up their SUV’s, their lifestyles, their concepts of freedom, their oil. They’re addicted to a lifestyle that involves using the rest of the world’s resources, that’s not going to be sustainable for very much longer. And like an addict, they know that day is coming, they can sense it. As a political body, America is like an addict on the side of the street, heavily in denial, doing everything possible to preserve its way of life, at the risk of knowing there’s a better future."
“Hopefully, it leads to most of America waking up, like addicts do, and realising ‘I can’t live like this, I have to get some help and do whatever it takes.’ America needs to come to hard decisions about what we need to do when the oil runs out, when we can’t live like this any more. The transition will be interesting.”
A lot of people aren’t going make it, and it’s going to be ugly, Tweedy believes. But it needs to be done for the world to survive, and people will do it. Provided, of course, that America doesn’t destroy itself first.
Does he sense that the administration encourages that fear?
“They play it like a pipe organ. It’s no accident. Their success is built upon playing on people’s fear. People are afraid of gay people, for instance. And always in the places where they have least contact with gay people. In San Francisco, people live side by side, see one another all the time and don’t feel threatened by gays. But in Tennessee, they’re scared to death of gay people, they seem to think they’re trying to take their Bibles away. Or take New York, the one place apart from the Pentagon which has been bombed by Islamic terrorists – they voted eight-to-one for John Kerry. They’re not afraid.”
Tweedy’s analysis is heartfelt, obviously correct as far as it goes, but arguably naïve. It seems to fixate on the ‘red states/blue states’ rural/urban dichotomy, as if America would transform into a liberal-socialist paradise overnight if only the Midwestern and southern States would secede or fall into the sea, which in any case would remove 95% of the rich musical culture that Wilco’s work can be traced to. But his sincerity, and the decency of his intentions, are above question. “Ideally, music should be above the fray, and art should exist in its own transcendent state, but the time has come when we have to put our shoulder to the wheel. It’s a revolting, terrible time – it’s becoming a theocracy like the Ayatollah’s Iran. In fact, the only difference between Bush and Bin Laden is that Bin Laden would appear to have some principles. I don’t understand patriotism, I never could. To me, it’s like being proud of having two arms and two legs. I think if you take your job seriously as an artist, you realise you have the potential to change people’s perceptions, and hopefully get through to them that it doesn’t have to be this way.”
The upside of George II’s Second Dark Age hasn’t, however, been lost on Tweedy. “Part of me thinks that America has needed this for a long time. Unfortunately it’s not what the rest of the world has needed, but it’s not that different from what America has been capable of for a long time. We’ve been doing terrible things around the world for decades, our governmental policies have been based on war addiction and exploiting the rest of the world, basically. It’s becoming more extreme, and it’s hopefully waking a lot of people up to this thing that’s always been there.”
Right on, sir. With you all the way.