Daily Listen by Brian Brock

Wilco - A Ghost Is Born

(hear two songs below)

I said before that TV On the Radio sounds better on their live CD than on their mannered studio CDs.  Wilco is the opposite.

I saw Wilco live a couple of years ago and loved it, but of course a CD is not a concert - you can’t see the interactions of the performers, it’s usually not as loud, and so on.  I often get bored at concerts, because bands tend to play the same song over and over again.  Live, Wilco might play a straight folk-rock song followed by a huge Nels Cline loop-driven orgiastic noise-smorgasbord, and I remain interested.

For home listening, though, and I am confining myself here to the popular idiom, I believe a collection of music should superficially have a consistent tone.  The listener should be able to depend on a given collection of music to fulfill a purpose in her life.  It’s not OK just to expect people to pay close attention all the time to every album, since people simply don’t listen to music in pure environments; the phone rings, the dishes wash, the dog eats poo.  (Concert environments are also corrupt, but for different reasons - not a lot of dogs at concerts these days.)

The close listener also should be rewarded, and this is why popular music should be only superficially consistent.  The internal workings of the sound, songs, lyrics, structures, performances, etc all direct the active listener toward greater involvement, but should not distract the passive listener.

What A Ghost Is Born expresses most clearly is the breakdown of this popular idiom.  For one thing, there is no volume level the passive listener can happily set on his stereo.  As Robert Christgau puts it,

Play the soft parts loud enough to hear and the loud parts will demonstrate the limitations of your cheapjack sound system, you pathetic transistorized consumer clone.

As you can hear below in “Less Than You Think”, the band, aided I’m sure by Jim O’Rourke as producer, further prevents passive listening by sequencing a ten-minute radio-breakdown feedback stream directly after a piece of lightly strummed melancholy, welding the parts into one track to foil shufflers and mp3-rippers.  That the lyrics invite the pairing is lost on the passive listener, who can’t even make them out, much less pay attention to them while trying to finish an essay on what Karl Marx would think of credit default swaps.

The breakdown of idioms is useful and beautiful in and of itself, and I have written about Cher and Mats Gustaffson making guest appearances at each others shows, but I don’t believe such works to be as important as those which have universal appeal.  Wilco already succeeded miraculously in inviting total passivity and/or total activity in listeners to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, so this album seems like a failure to pursue that endeavor, when from another band it would seem to be a good expression of experimentalism.