Discerning the Body: Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born at 20
Wilco’s pivotal 5th album dissed theologians and disappointed the critics. Its noise is an invitation to the sacramental imagination.
Review by Charlie Clark
It was not until researching for this review that I learned that, back in 2004, the critics did not love Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born. Virtually every comparison to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was negative—and the comparisons were unending. In a sort of middle-distance retrospect, this makes sense. YHF has been described as Wilco’s Sgt. Pepper’s: experimental enough to impress the highbrows but without sacrificing mass appeal. Ghost’s experiments are both fewer in number and far more extreme. There are long stretches of the elevated, verse-chorus dad rock that would later dominate Sky Blue Sky; there are also 12 continuous minutes of electronic drone. In the contemporary music press, one can see the album falling between two stools: having cast off Jay Bennett—lead guitarist, obsessive engineer, and constant source of creative conflict—Jeff Tweedy had created an album that was simultaneously too boring and too weird. The faint praise was deafening.
Back when I was first listening to Ghost, I had no idea about any of that. I don’t think I would have been able to name a music magazine besides Rolling Stone, which I didn’t read. Also it was 2006, and Ghost had been out for two years, so I wouldn’t have seen the review anyway. What my sixteen-year-old self did have was a brand-new driver’s license and a twelve-year-old car that I paid fifteen hundred summer-job dollars for. I had started listening to Wilco because Donald Miller praised YHF in the acknowledgments for Blue Like Jazz. I owned YHF on iTunes, which for me, who did not own an iPod, meant that I could listen to it on my family’s computer while I played Age of Empires 2. But one of my first acts as the proprietor of a car stereo was to drive to Barnes and Noble and buy the “new” Wilco album on CD. I remember putting it on as I drove away from my grandparents’ house in Russellville, Kentucky, a place not accessible by interstate, turning up “At Least That’s What You Said” loud enough to hear the guitar part at the beginning before the piano comes in. Judging by the contemporary reviews, which universally describe that track as opening with the piano, no one else was listening properly, which is to say: all the way up in a ‘94 Camry.
Maybe it’s just projection, but I think my physical experience of this album—its boundupness with Tennessee summer heat and an aluminum-clad plastic disc, with traceable highways and one particular sound system—revealed its nature to me, and in a way that was lost on the cosmopolites writing for Pitchfork and “Consumer Guide.” YHF was the album for them: a transmission from a distant solar system, intricately crafted to traverse the interstellar spaces between Chicago and Greenwich Village and, miraculously, to arrive intact. The conceit of YHF is how its signal cuts through its noise: the way the garbled first-person of each verse of “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” snaps into crystal-clear focus when it finds the second-person, like a scrolling tuner finding its frequency. By contrast, Ghost is an embodied album. On lead guitar, Tweedy is making this music with his own two hands. It is searingly immediate, with a minimum of post-recording tinkering. And its theme is about how the noise of embodiment—how, whatever else it might be, to be a human being is to be a “storm of atoms / ellipically, electrically alive”—threatens to swamp whatever signal is coming from our hearts and minds.
As minds alienated from our senses, we are also alienated from other minds, which we can encounter only through our shared embodiment.
While he was making Ghost, Tweedy’s body was in crisis. His lifelong suffering from migraine headaches, consequent addiction to painkillers, and growing anxiety pervade both music and lyrics. He has described the guitar solo on “At Least That’s What You Said,” as a “transcription” of a panic attack, “Handshake Drugs” is about what it says, and the aforementioned 12 minutes of drone was “an attempt to express the slow painful rise and dissipation of migraine in music.” If YHF was optimistic about the power of communication—words, songs—to give us knowledge of one another, of “radio cures” to heal the seemingly infinite distance between bodies, on Ghost the glass is decidedly half-empty: “fill up your mind with all it can know / don’t forget that your body will let it all go,” as Tweedy says on “Wishful Thinking.” The spirit is willing; the flesh is weak.
Walker Percy wrote of the “dread chasm that has rent the soul of Western man ever since the famous philosopher Descartes ripped body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that haunts its own house.” Because, per Descartes, we cannot trust our senses, we are thrown back on the mind, on reason unencumbered by the body, as our only guide to reality. As minds alienated from our senses, we are also alienated from other minds, which we can encounter only through our shared embodiment. Ghost resigns itself to this loneliness: “I said maybe if I leave you’ll want me / to come back home / or maybe all you mean / is leave me alone”; “all these telescopic poems / it’s good to be alone… it’s good to be alone / I’ll be in my bed.”
But having retreated to the “unbreachable fortress” of unencumbered reason, what happens when we notice the bodily basis, the spaghetti-wired, sparking hardware of the human mind? On “Less Than You Think,” Tweedy draws the obvious conclusion: “your mind’s a machine / It’s deadly and dull / it’s never been still and its will has never been free.” The Enlightenment is really no match for the general demurrer of a migraine headache. Per Joan Didion: “chills, sweating, nausea, a debility that seems to stretch the very limits of endurance. That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.” From whatever mental flight of fancy, a migraine slams you back inside the prison walls of your skull. For Tweedy, the migraine is a revelation; what he thinks of as his self, his mind, his being in the world, is a false, crackable veneer: “your spine starts to shine / and you shiver at your soul / a fist so clear and climbing / punches a hole in the sky / so you can see for yourself / if you don’t believe me / there’s so much less to this than you think.”
This deflationary picture of the human mind and human meaning, of the possibilities of speech and self-revelation, is in tension with the act of making—or, at least, recording—music in the first place. But perhaps the sacramental character of reality is only legible to us if, from time to time, we focus on the elements in their accidents instead of their substance. When Jeff Tweedy records 12 minutes of whining, droning, aching sound and inscribes it on a polycarbonate wafer, it is as if to say, “This is my body.” The noise becomes more than noise; it becomes the object of contemplation and of communion. The more is less is more. In spite of the general ghostliness of our existence, we remain ghosts that speak and sing, that drive and listen, that play guitar, write, suffer, die, and are born again.
Charlie Clark is a writer and retractor. He lives in New Hampshire.
A Ghost is Born was released on June 22, 2004 by Nonesuch Records. You can listen to and buy the album from the label here.
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