{"id":9703,"date":"2024-06-19T00:49:46","date_gmt":"2024-06-19T00:49:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=9703"},"modified":"2024-06-19T14:15:08","modified_gmt":"2024-06-19T14:15:08","slug":"a-ghost-is-born","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/19\/a-ghost-is-born\/","title":{"rendered":"A Ghost Is Born"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Discerning the Body: Wilco\u2019s A Ghost Is Born at 20<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Wilco\u2019s pivotal 5th album dissed theologians and disappointed the critics. Its noise is an invitation to the sacramental imagination.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Charlie Clark<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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It was not until researching for this review that I learned that, back in 2004, the critics did not love Wilco\u2019s A Ghost Is Born<\/i>. Virtually every comparison to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot<\/i> was negative\u2014and the comparisons were unending. In a sort of middle-distance retrospect, this makes sense. YHF <\/i>has been described as Wilco\u2019s Sgt. Pepper\u2019s<\/i>: experimental enough to impress the highbrows but without sacrificing mass appeal. Ghost<\/i>\u2019s 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<\/i>; 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\u2014lead guitarist, obsessive engineer, and constant source of creative conflict\u2014Jeff Tweedy had created an album that was simultaneously too boring and too weird. The faint praise was deafening.<\/p>

Back when I was first listening to Ghost<\/i>, I had no idea about any of that. I don\u2019t think I would have been able to name a music magazine besides Rolling Stone<\/i>, which I didn\u2019t read. Also it was 2006, and Ghost<\/i> had been out for two years, so I wouldn\u2019t have seen the review anyway. What my sixteen-year-old self did have was a brand-new driver\u2019s 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<\/i> in the acknowledgments for Blue Like Jazz<\/i>. I owned YHF<\/i> on iTunes, which for me, who did not own an iPod, meant that I could listen to it on my family\u2019s computer while I played Age of Empires 2<\/i>. But one of my first acts as the proprietor of a car stereo was to drive to Barnes and Noble and buy the \u201cnew\u201d Wilco album on CD. I remember putting it on as I drove away from my grandparents\u2019 house in Russellville, Kentucky, a place not accessible by interstate, turning up \u201cAt Least That\u2019s What You Said\u201d 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 \u201894 Camry.\u00a0<\/p>

Maybe it\u2019s just projection, but I think my physical experience of this album\u2014its boundupness with Tennessee summer heat and an aluminum-clad plastic disc, with traceable highways and one particular sound system\u2014revealed its nature to me, and in a way that was lost on the cosmopolites writing for Pitchfork<\/i> and \u201cConsumer Guide.\u201d YHF <\/i>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 <\/i>is how its signal cuts through its noise: the way the garbled first-person of each verse of \u201cI Am Trying to Break Your Heart\u201d snaps into crystal-clear focus when it finds the second-person, like a scrolling tuner finding its frequency. By contrast, Ghost<\/i> 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\u2014how, whatever else it might be, to be a human being is to be a \u201cstorm of atoms \/ ellipically, electrically alive\u201d<\/a>\u2014threatens to swamp whatever signal is coming from our hearts and minds.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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As minds alienated from our senses, we are also alienated from other minds, which we can encounter only through our shared embodiment.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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While he was making Ghost<\/i>, Tweedy\u2019s 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 \u201cAt Least That\u2019s What You Said,\u201d as a \u201ctranscription\u201d of a panic attack, \u201cHandshake Drugs\u201d is about what it says, and the aforementioned 12 minutes of drone was \u201can attempt to express the slow painful rise and dissipation of migraine in music.\u201d If YHF<\/i> was optimistic about the power of communication\u2014words, songs\u2014to give us knowledge of one another, of \u201cradio cures\u201d to heal the seemingly infinite distance between bodies, on Ghost<\/i> the glass is decidedly half-empty: \u201cfill up your mind with all it can know \/ don\u2019t forget that your body will let it all go,\u201d as Tweedy says on \u201cWishful Thinking.\u201d The spirit is willing; the flesh is weak.<\/p>

Walker Percy wrote of the \u201cdread 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.\u201d 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 <\/i>resigns itself to this loneliness: \u201cI said maybe if I leave you\u2019ll want me \/ to come back home \/ or maybe all you mean \/ is leave me alone\u201d; \u201call these telescopic poems \/ it\u2019s good to be alone\u2026 it\u2019s good to be alone \/ I\u2019ll be in my bed.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>

But having retreated to the \u201cunbreachable fortress\u201d of unencumbered reason, what happens when we notice the bodily basis, the spaghetti-wired, sparking hardware of the human mind? On \u201cLess Than You Think,\u201d Tweedy draws the obvious conclusion: \u201cyour mind\u2019s a machine \/ It\u2019s deadly and dull \/ it\u2019s never been still and its will has never been free.\u201d The Enlightenment is really no match for the general demurrer of a migraine headache. Per Joan Didion: \u201cchills, 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.\u201d 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: \u201cyour 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\u2019t believe me \/ there\u2019s so much less to this than you think.\u201d<\/p>

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\u2014or, at least, recording\u2014music 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, \u201cThis is my body.\u201d 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.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Charlie Clark<\/strong> is a writer and retractor<\/a>. He lives in New Hampshire.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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A Ghost is Born<\/strong> was released on June 22, 2004 by Nonesuch Records. You can listen to and buy the album from the label here<\/a>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wilco\u2019s fifth album musically captures\u2014and communicates\u2014the essential bodiliness of human persons. Review by Charlie Clark<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":9705,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","category-newsletter","entry","has-media"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/farefwd.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/A-Ghost-Is-Born-3D.jpg?fit=1500%2C1372&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9703"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9718,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9703\/revisions\/9718"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent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