The Whole Love: More ‘Jesus, Etc.’ from Wilco
Late last month my wife and I buzzed up to Boston to catch Wilco, the long-suffering folk-rock group out of Chicago, in advance of their new album, The Whole Love (click here to listen via Spotify). Led, in a sort of disconsolate slouch, by songwriter Jeff Tweedy, Wilco was once a poster child for the desultory pop genre called indie rock. But Wilco has become something bigger: not only a big seller but more professionally packaged onstage and online, and more ambitious artistically. In its choice of instruments—lap steel to digitized loops—and its influences—the Dead, Woody Guthrie, and early punk—Wilco is verging on becoming, as I someone in my row in Boston called them, the Great American Rock and Roll band.
I bring Wilco up on this blog because Tweedy’s music is as Christ-haunted as the American landscape itself. Christianity comes up on nearly every Wilco album—in the voice of a skeptic, in words that sound like genuine praise, and in closely observed moments from the pews. “You’ll stand each Sunday / a hymnal steady in your hand,” a soldier sings to his wife in “I’ll Fight” (click here to listen via Spotify). “You’ll sing to yourself the rising falling melody / that you could never read/without the choir’s lead.
“I’ll Fight” is Tweedy’s Iraq War song from his 2009 album, Wilco, The Album (or maybe his Civil War song; the 40-something Tweedy affects the extravagantly unkempt look of a Matthew Brady battlefield portrait). The song’s soldier goes on to sing of the trade he’s made with the civilians he left behind, and the deal is as spiritual as it is civic: “If I die / I’ll die alone / Like Jesus on the cross / My faith will not be tossed / My life will not be lost / if my love comes across.”
Devout as that sounds, Tweedy has made statements that suggest he’s not a churchgoer. And the quaint explicitness of “I’ll Fight” makes it sound like more like quoted matter than Tweedy’s own theologizing. On the last track of the new album, “On Sunday Morning (For Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend)” a man tells how deeply his father’s biblically sourced prejudices scarred their relationship. “My father said what I had become / No one should be,” Tweedy sings mournfully. But in an interview, Tweedy has confirmed that the song is based on a conversation with the novelist Smiley’s companion at a dinner party. Wilco’s rapture-ready “Airline to Heaven,” is literally a quote–a setting of lyrics by Guthrie: “Them’s got ears, let ‘em hear / Them’s got eyes, let ‘em see / Turn your eyes to the Lord of the skies.” A dedicated folkie, Tweedy has defended the place of “representational art” in music. Religion may work its way into his songs just as church spires or revival tents naturally figure in paintings by Thomas Hart Benton or Grant Wood.
But nothing in Wilco’s world is ever so cut and dried. As Tweedy sings about heartache from the heartland, broken factory windows and love confused by substance abuse, God gets mixed in with pain, everyday redemption, and random experience. Skeptics are as undone by their mistrust of faith as believers are by their conviction. In “Jesus, Etc.,” from 2001, the Lord’s name in the title turns out to be an imprecation and a plea—“Jesus, don’t cry,” the singer says to his girl, but by the end of the song God comes back in as a dispenser of love: “Our love is all we have/Our love is all of God’s money.”
In other words, Tweedy’s thrashing out of religious themes sounds like a genuine discussion, one you’d have with your kids or close friends. His spiritual self waffles, pushes back, despairs. In Boston, the band played a track off the new album called “Born Alone” that is full of provocative spiritual images, from the opening line, “I have heard the war and worry of the gospel ferried fast across the void,” to the bleak conclusion, “I was born to die alone.” As this existential rant faded away and the band rounded into an old favorite about a casual drug buy, a shout went up. Tweedy is not selling Christian religion or, it doesn’t seem likely, buying it. But he’s certainly dragged it and its issues out to the places where it all started.
Tags: Wilco
My goodness. This is popular music? Are all young people sour, angry, resentful, confused, whiny? No joy in life, no purely personal sadness, no quiet wisdom, no beauty, no gratitude, no strength after adversity, no peace and acceptance and understanding, no quiet courage, positive hope?
David, first of all, take care to distinguish between the popularity levels of Wilco vs., say, Ke$ha. That alone makes me sour, angry, resentful, confused, and whiny. Anyway, the former’s audience is more or less coextensive with NPR’s, if that clarifies things. Second of all, I know you were going for rhetorical punch, but it’s still ambitious to leap from a single person’s review of a single album by a single band to an ominous question about the emotional profile of some monolithic fantasy called “all young people.” In short, my answers to your three questions: relatively, not always, and please let’s not be silly.
David hates everything and he will always post about it.
roquestrew, I was just asking – I really don’t know, being completely disconnected from popular music. I do spend an inordinate amount of time in Starbucks, though, and much of the music they play is, alas, sour, confused, whiny, and even occasionally angry. I grew up when popular music was, on the whole, intimate, playful, lusty, and even joyful. Much of what I hear these days – mostly from open car windows and in the background in stores – is, indeed, either angry or whiny. That would seem to suggest, I think, that other sorts of popular music don’t abound.
I’d be grateful to you – and to Abe – if you could show me where I’m misguided. I hate to think that if I’m ever in a hospital or nursing home I won’t necessarily be at the mercy of angry and whiny young doctors and nurses.
In defense of David –
I can’t hear music anymore, but I often watch the closed-captioned lyrics of the bands who end the Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon late-nite programs. Usually I am very saddened by them. Last night the group at the end of Leno’s show did a song whose lyrics at the end used as a refrain “Rape and murder… Rape and murder…Rape and murder . . .”. The band on Fallon’s show ended with, “Break the law, Break the law, Break the law, Break the law . . . “.
I’ll grant you those are among the worst I’ve seen, but I do have to conclude that if their lyrics say anything, it’s that young people these days are in an extraordinarily negative mood. And I’m assuming, because of the popularity of those two shows, that the bands are representative of what’s going down today.
The band on Jimmy Fallon was Judas Priest, which has been around for over 40 years. Their lead singer is 60 years old. Their lyrics have nothing to say about the mood of young people.
What is the mood of young people, then, Abe? If it’s positive, hopeful, loving, joyful, and even sad and reflective without being bitter and angry, why don’t I hear that on the streets and in the stores? (I’m sorry to make this sound so personal – far too much “I” here – but I don’t have any other reference.) It would be good to know that things are better than they seem.
Postscript. Does the fact that there’s a forty-year-old angry band on a late-night television show mean that only angry old guys watch that show? No doubt the music is chosen to please the audience.
There is exactly one mood that all young people have, David, and you were actually right to start with: the tiny sampling of music from one band (that very few people under the age of 30 listen to, because the band consists of middle-age men) is a complete reflection of the negativity of youth. You and Anne are right to feel disconcerted by this new, never before seen phenomenon that is negativity in the music of the young. Hopefully, it’s just a phase and young people will get back to the posi pop sounds of the 60s and 70s. You know: Black Sabbath, Joy Division, and Black Flag.
Actually, I really, really hope that that is exactly what happens.
Positive music ? Black Flag’s hard core punk? The kind of positive stuff Black Sabbath did as Ozzie Osborne bit off the head of a chicken in one concert?
Thanks for this, Paul. A couple of other relevant nuggets:
-In an interview with Chicago magazine, regarding the tune One Sunday Morning: “Now he’s [the dead father] going to know he was wrong and that there is an only loving God,” Tweedy explains. Seems his trouble isn’t as much with Christian belief per se, but how belief can drive some folks to say and do hurtful things.
-In Jeff Tweedy’s concert DVD “Sunken Treasure,” after he yells at audience members to stop talking during songs, he says this in an offstage interview: “There’s a collective experience happening at a rock concert that I’ve always assumed would probably be what church should be like.” Not sure if you had this experience at the show you went to, but Wilco shows give me a glimpse of something bigger than myself in a way good liturgy does.
Thanks for extending the discussion of my original post here, everybody.
Michael, I’ve seen these quotes, and was close to putting the latter in the post. It’s remarkable to find a rocker who has any hopes for what church should be like. Indeed, Tweedy seems sympathetic to Christian belief and its possibilities for redemption and joy, or at least he seems content to reckon with these ideas in Christian language. I agree that “Sunday Morning” is concerned with how the ideas get distorted in practice. I omitted the quote because I didn’t want to get into Tweedy’s personal practice, whereof I cannot speak. My point was that it’s important to recognize that Tweedy is quoting someone else in that song. It is, he tells us, an long, old story.
David, I agree that there is in pop music, at least as far back as the early ’90s, a piercing whine. Rock is the sound of alienation; in the past decades it’s gone from expressing young people’s alienation from the establishment, which often sounded like liberation, to alienation from self, which can sound self-pampering. But artists have dwelt on these moods for a long time, indulging them and satirizing them. If I were in a nursing home, I wouldn’t want to hearing anyone paging Dr. Dostoevsky either. Dr. Chekov, maybe. But only maybe.
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