As I was telling Jimmy yesterday, I was out & about in Wrigleyville with my iPod & it just clicked for me--A Ghost Is Born I mean. Initially, the songs I'd downloaded (still don't have the full album, but will break my moratorium on CD purchases for this one) failed to grab me the way, say, "Jesus Etc." did from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but that might've been because I was listening to the tracks as singles, individual songs, shuffled in random order, rather than as part of an organized larger whole. What, back in the day, used to be known as an LP record. Seeing Wilco play "Hummingbird" on Letterman the other night softened me up to the newer songs as well.
In any case, here's an ok article from the Sunday New York Timesabout the band titled "The Ever-Expanding Legend of Wilco" that is slightly annoying, because its stereotype of fervent Wilco worshippers strikes me as being largely a straw man constructed by the reporter to show off how 'broad minded' his or her tastes are. Where the reporter, Kalefa Sannah, gets the notion that the bulk of Wilco fans are aging boomers, I don't know. Someone should tell Sannah that people in their late 20s to mid 40s are not baby boomers. ('Course, as Westerberg put it "We got no war to name us," so perhaps this generation remains as demographically invisible as Douglas Coupland and all those generation-X writers believed back in the early 1990s.) In the course of discussing A Ghost is Born, Sanneh never explains why he would pick J Lo & the "mutiethic hordes" (whores?) on the dance floor over Wilco's rock 'n' roll experiments, but, then again, who cares.
There's not a lot in the article that hasn't been written elsewhere (last week's Chicago Reader cover story had the full scoop on Tweedy's recent struggles with anxiety and addiction and Wilco's shifting lineup and it didn't present it in VH1-behind-the-music-tabloid fashion), but at least this NYT article has a great photo of the band. It'll be interesting to see how Ghost does when it hits the stores on Tuesday.
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I think the reviewers are giving Wilco a pass, not that I give a damn what rock reviewers think anyway. I still don't think the album's that great: too self-indulgent for me, and I think the experimentation doesn't serve much of a purpose outside the need for Tweedy et al to figure out what the hell Wilco is after all these years. Dig up your Genesis and King Crimson: this is prog-rock, man.
Prog rock it may be, but it's sounding better to me all the time. When Summerteeth came out I remember Clark saying something to the effect that the record was a bit too prog rock in places for his tastes and that some of the songs with horns were a bit too close to Chicago (the band). I could and still can hear where he was coming from, though Jeff Tweedy is no Peter Cetera, and thank god for that.
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