The Oughts: The Album of the Decade

The Best Disc of the Decade: Wilco “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” (2002…kind of)

There are two reasons why this album is the best of the decade. One is what it meant musically. The other is what it meant to the music business.

Musically it is simply a collection of perfect, nonconformist songs. Some songs discard the typical verse chorus verse structure. Others meander along for a while before returning to a central core. Over the course of the disc Wilco breaks from being an Americana band trying to cover Byrds songs and becomes something different. Not a rock band, not Dylan, but something falling in between.

And like Gillian Welch at number two this album ties itself to the most important event of the decade in 9/11. And like Gillian Welch it was not meant to have any connection at all. It is strange that outside of Springsteen’s “The Rising” there really was no music that linked itself to the moment that we all can find ourselves transported back to in a moment and the only moment of my life where I could say that the world changed as I watched television. Over the course of the album Jeff Tweedy sings “Tall buildings shake, voices escape singing sad, sad songs”, songs are titled “War on War” and “Ashes of American Flags” and a distant broadcaster’s voice repeats the radio call signs “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.” The album is introspective and simply feels of those months where we all wondered what this new world would be.

For that alone, this would be a top 15 album. It is the story behind the album that makes it the most important disc of the decade.

Prior to this disc Wilco was a well respected but not altogether popular band. They never sold 100,000 copies of an album but toured well and made the label money. They were a music fan’s band in the days of boy bands and Limp Bizkit. Their label gave them the money to create Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and when they saw the product they hated it to the point of dropping Wilco from the label and giving them the rights to the music for free. All because they did not see a hit song in the mix.

So what did Wilco do? They put the album online in fall of 2001 for everyone to hear. Critics and fans alike listened to it and thought it was amazing and could not believe that they could not get it in stores and that no label would release it. I knew a record store that was burning the CD for people who didn’t have a high speed internet connection. Everyone wanted to have a copy of the record. Labels started to get into a bidding war over the rights. Eventually Wilco signed with a label and the album was released commercially.

Here is the fun part. The label that dropped Wilco and the label that resigned them were essentially the same label. Warner Brothers owned both of them. They were paid for the same album twice and their greatest promotion came from releasing the album on their own online.

The music industry as we knew it in the nineties is dead. The labels no longer have control. The artists now have the power. There are flaws in this system to be sure but understand one thing; anything that allows for the creation of art such as this is worth the cost.