Why does Jeff Tweedy's latest critique of America make me uncomfortable?
On Further Review: Wilco - Cruel Country
Recently, I reviewed the new Wilco double album Cruel Country.
When the band announced Cruel Country a month before its May 27th release date — a surprise drop of sorts — they did so via a lengthy statement from bandleader Jeff Tweedy that framed the album as a kind of reckoning with country music and with the USA itself.
“I feel a responsibility,” his statement reads, “to investigate the mirrored problematic natures [of both country music and] the country where I was born.”
The full statement is copied below, and there are a number of things about it that I'm uneasy with — starting with the implication that country music is inherently more “problematic” than other genres. I mean, I can see how that assertion isn’t exactly pulled out of thin air, but it’s a stereotype that strikes me as crude and indulgent.
I should first say that I’m no small admirer of Tweedy’s. I wrote in my review of his 2019 solo album WARMER that I’d put him “on the list of the most effortless songwriters we’ve ever known.” Believe it or not, I was actually understating my feelings on his talents — straight up, I regard him as one of songwriting’s all-time greats. And in that review, I described him as “[America’s] friendly uncle at the Fourth of July barbecue.”
The following year, I raved about his songwriting again in my review of the deluxe reissue of Wilco’s Summerteeth. And, for the most part, I found his 2018 autobiography utterly delightful and satisfying on a level that I’d describe as nourishing — and not just nourishing the way a single meal would be nourishing, but deeply nourishing, as in: it felt like it was sustaining me over a period of weeks.
I should also stress: to say that I’m sympathetic to the idea that certain forms of patriotism lead to ugly places would be quite the understatement. As an admirer of many people who’ve looked at the USA through an unflinchingly critical eye, I’ve always seen this country as ripe for criticism. Aside from our troubled origin story, I think Americans should make an effort to grapple with the question of what hegemonic world-power status has cost when it comes to loss of life.
In fact, I’ve long felt that our inability to properly process our history has fostered a kind of collective psychosis — deep down, I suspect Americans can sense that, to some degree, it's bloodshed that makes all of this comfort and convenience possible. But the inability to let ourselves entertain that idea creates a psychological blind spot where everything we try to shove out of view comes roaring back to bite us anyway.
With all that said, I’m deeply uncomfortable making blanket assumptions about American conservatives and conservative values. I don’t actually disagree with Jeff Tweedy when he sings I love my country / stupid and cruel / red, white and blue. As I suggest in my review, it’s his framing of that sentiment that irks me.
For one, it’s easy for artists to assume these kinds of postures. It’s like throwing meat to wolves. And it strikes me as cheap. It panders to divisiveness and appeals to the base instinct to engage in other-ing. While I think taking our country to task is absolutely necessary, it's very tempting to fall into a one-dimensional mode of criticism that doesn't encompass the whole picture.
When musicians go for the low-hanging fruit by aligning themselves with ideas that are in-vogue, I often feel like I’m being conned — even when I agree with the stance they’re taking. I don’t like being pandered-to, regardless of whether the person doing the pandering appears to be coming from the same direction as me. And I have to say that I find it dangerous to portray the people of Middle America as barbarians at the gate.
Lust for tribalism is rampant these days, and I think we need to be extremely careful. There’s an almost pornographic quality in the way we enjoy de-humanizing people who don’t hold the same worldview. We’ve gotten to a point where we’re getting off on being in a constant state of disgust, of projecting all of our own unresolved darkness onto others. And I would prefer that artists be a little more aware before they start dangling those kinds of sentiments in front of their audience as a fast track to approval.
Jeff Tweedy, as I mention in my review, has traveled across the USA many, many times. I have a hard time believing that he looks out into his audience — and at the people in all these towns he’s visited — and sees the one-dimensional picture of Middle America that outlets like The New York Times and their ilk can't stop themselves from painting.
But here’s the strangest thing about this: Tweedy goes out of his way to set the album up as a kind of treatise on America’s sins, but he’s not heavy-handed about it — at all — in the actual songs:
All of which is to say that Tweedy gets out of his own way and avoids overburdening Cruel Country with pedantic rhetoric. As a songwriter of near-unparalleled skill and seasoning, Tweedy manages to make Cruel Country an enchanting listen even for those who see a very different America than he does.
Having played together for the last 18 years, this Wilco line-up could never be accused of being short on musicianship or chemistry. For the most part, Cruel Country consists of complete takes of the entire band playing in one room. There are times when the comfort between the musicians muffles the passion in Tweedy’s search for answers, but the live-in-the-studio element fosters a sense of imperfection and risk that [ultimately] serves the album’s themes rather nicely.
In terms of the music, I think the band is to be commended for pushing itself out of its comfort zone. Cruel Country isn’t very obtrusive, but since it hovers more or less in the same mellow gear for 77 minutes, it takes a lot of patience to sit through. Oddly, the music is very easy to settle into and takes some time and effort to digest in totality — a gutsy move that I have a lot of admiration for.
But you can see for yourself:
At the end of the day, I'm still ordering my cd copy as soon as the band begins accepting orders. (Supply-chain issues have caused a delay in the physical formats.) And my regard for Tweedy hasn't diminished one iota. In fact, you could say I'm even more impressed than ever in that, in my opinion, he managed to get out of his own way this time. Just when he was on the verge of saddling the new Wilco album with a pedantic, reductive, all too easy take that echoes talking points which require no real conviction or even investment to just repeat off the now-familiar script, he managed to pull the throttle back and make art instead.
Tweedy’s statement:
Wilco goes Country! Is that something people still say? Do people still “go” Country? I mean, I’m saying it, but I doubt it’s something a lot of other people would say, especially about a Wilco album. Because I think there’s been an assumption over the years that Wilco is some sort of Country band. To be specific, early on, coming out of Uncle Tupelo, that really felt like a widely-held belief. And, sure, there’s a lot of evidence to support that way of thinking about our band, because there have been elements of Country music in everything we’ve ever done. But to be honest, we’ve never been particularly comfortable with accepting that definition of the music we make. With this album though, I’ll tell you what, Wilco is digging in and calling it Country. Our Country. Cruel Country. Country music that sounds like us to our ears. In the past, it was always valuable and liberating for us to steer clear of the “Country” moniker. It helped us grow and keep our minds open to inspiration from near and far. But now, having been around the block a few times, we’re finding it exhilarating to free ourselves within the form, and embrace the simple limitation of calling the music we’re making Country.
How did we get here? The story of this record starts in a way that I’m sure is very familiar to bands of all shapes and sizes in this semi-post-pandemic world. Simply put, having something so elemental to how we’ve lived most of our lives taken away for so long made the plain old pleasure of sitting in a room together and making music feel urgent. When we were finally able to make that happen at the beginning of this year—2022—we began the way we always do, experimenting with different types of songs and styles hoping to discover something new and inspiring. We were looking for the record we didn’t know we could make, the record that would surprise us. But looking for novel shapes while sitting smack-dab in the middle of the giant disorienting and unfamiliar shape that is our world at the moment felt untethered and futile. So Country and Folk songs started happening. Loads of them. The tried-and-true became the ground on which to project the world’s hallucinations. “What is happening?“ “I don’t know. Let’s see if it makes more sense sung to a waltz.” With six people playing together at once, these were also the songs easiest to latch onto quickly. Which helped us all focus the urgency we were feeling into new songs to sing.
The whole record is comprised, almost entirely, of live takes, with just a handful of overdubs. Everyone in the room together with a leaky drum booth and no baffles. It’s a really great way to make a record. But due to artistic curiosity and no small shortage of challenging logistics, it’s an approach we haven’t used in years—maybe not since Sky Blue Sky. It’s a style of recording that forces a band to surrender control and learn to trust each other, along with each others’ imperfections, musical and otherwise. With no “one” person in charge, the goal can be vague. But a certain type of faith emerges. A belief that we’re all heading toward the same destination, and we either get there together or not at all. It’s messy. Like democracy. But when it’s working the way it’s supposed to, it feels like gathering around some wild collective instrument, one that requires six sets of hands to play. An instrument that forces one to communicate wordlessly and sprout deep tangles of roots, like an old forest.
Once I started listening back to what we had done—as Cruel Country began to take its shape as a double record—a narrative began to emerge. Our little democracy had apparently been moved to semi-consciously spit out a picture of our currently-addled democracy. In spite of ourselves, and all of our concerns and efforts to distract, we had made an “American music” album about “America.” And if you listen closely I do believe there is a rough chronological outline of how we got here, to the present-day USA, that is. I see it in how the album starts with the images of migration contained in early songs like “I Am My Mother”, ‘Hints”, and “Empty Condor”. And I see it in how the record winds down with “The Plains”, where the notion of going anywhere at all, much less exploring for greener pastures, has fallen on hard times. It isn’t always direct and easy to spot, but there are flashes of clarity. It’s all mixed up and mixed in, the way my personal feelings about America are often woven with all of our deep collective myths. Simply put, people come and problems emerge. Worlds collide. It’s beautiful. And cruel. The specifics of an American identity begin to blur for me as the record moves toward the light and opens itself up to more cosmic solutions—coping with fear, without belonging to any nation or group other than humanity itself.
Which leads us to death. There’s death…quite a bit of it actually. Maybe you’ve come to expect that from my songs. If you haven’t, you should, because I’ve given up entirely at resisting the topic… but here, let’s at least put it in the context of a dying empire. As we’ve done our best to embrace the stress and joy of not knowing what happens next. What does it all mean? What are the connections? How does it relate to itself? How does it relate to ME? When a record asks me those questions, I can listen forever.
More than any other genre, Country music, to me, a white kid from middle-class middle America, has always been the ideal place to comment on what most troubles my mind—which for more than a little while now has been the country where I was born, these United States. And because it is the country I love, and because it’s Country music that I love, I feel a responsibility to investigate their mirrored problematic natures. I believe it’s important to challenge our affections for things that are flawed. I feel like these defining parts of who we are demand introspection. No one should need to ask. We should feel compelled to contemplate. To ask if there are ways to fix things, if there are things that just need to be accepted. And maybe to see if we can stop trying to figure out how to separate two things that can’t be separated. Country music is simply designed to aim squarely at the low-hanging fruit of the truth. If someone can sing it, and it’s given a voice… well, then it becomes very hard not to see. We’re looking at it. It’s a cruel country, and it’s also beautiful. Love it or leave it. Or if you can’t love it, maybe you’ve already left.