Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and What It Still Means to Be American

A shortwave numbers station opens and closes this record. A woman’s voice reading phonetic alphabet sequences into the air, yankee, hotel, foxtrot, and somewhere a receiver is tuned to the right frequency or it isn’t, and the voice keeps going either way. Mention this because it matters and then move on: the album is not about the station. The album is about the country the station is broadcasting from, and what that country did to the people who lived in the parts of it that didn’t make money fast enough.

This is a Chicago album in the way that Horses is a New York album, which is to say: the city isn’t the setting, the city is the argument. Chicago in 2001 was already the thing that would later become a talking point, a city where the national project was visibly not arriving, where the distance between the country on television and the country outside the window had become architectural. You could see it in the buildings. The Marina City towers on the cover, those concrete corncobs, brutalist municipal optimism from 1964, designed to keep the middle class from fleeing to the suburbs. A building designed to solve a problem that turned out to be unsolvable. Still standing. Still not solving it. Nobody knocked them down. That’s worse. When a building gets knocked down at least someone has to notice.

Tweedy grew up in Belleville, Illinois. Southern Illinois, not the suburbs of Chicago but the kind of place that produces people who move to Chicago and then spend the rest of their lives writing about what they left. The small-town Midwest that the national narrative requires as backdrop (heartland, real America, salt of the earth) and then abandons as economic fact. Belleville had a population of 42,000 in 1980 and a population of 42,000 in 2000 and the sameness of the number is the kind of stasis that looks like stability from a distance and like suffocation from inside.

Here is what happened to Belleville and to every town like it. The factories left. Not all at once but in the way that matters more, which is slowly, over decades, so that no single closing was a crisis and the cumulative effect was invisible to anyone who wasn’t living in it. One plant shuts down and the local paper covers it. Two more close and the paper itself folds. The grocery store that depended on the factory workers loses half its customers, then closes, and now the nearest fresh food is a thirty-minute drive, and the people who can’t make that drive eat what the gas station sells, and their health outcomes shift in ways that will show up in county mortality data twenty years later, and nobody will connect the deaths to the plant closing because by then the plant has been demolished and the lot is empty and the county has been redrawn into a district so red or so blue that no candidate for national office has any reason to visit. This is not a metaphor. This is the exposed mechanism. This is what the album sounds like.

The static that drifts through every track, the radio bleed, the keyboard tones that arrive from somewhere the instruments aren’t — Jim O’Rourke’s production treats the songs as sites rather than performances, and the sites are these towns. The foreground/background distinction that most rock production enforces gets dissolved. You’re not sure what’s the melody and what’s the decay. That confusion is the point. In Belleville the decay is the environment. It’s not something that happened to the town. It’s the town now.

“Jesus, Etc.” is the one that escaped. “Tall buildings shake, voices escape singing sad sad songs.” Written before September 11. Recorded before September 11. Released after. The coincidence has been noted so many times that noting it is its own cliche, so let’s talk about what the coincidence actually reveals, which is whose buildings count. September 11 was a national trauma because it happened to buildings that the nation could see, in a city the nation was already watching. The tall buildings in Belleville and Peoria and Rockford had been shaking for decades. Factories closing, main streets going dark, population graphs going flat in that particular way that looks like a plateau and is actually a cliff viewed from above. Nobody flew planes into those buildings. They just stopped sending money and waited. The result is the same. The buildings come down. The difference is whether anyone calls it a tragedy or just calls it the market.¹

“I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” opens the album with the line “I am an American aquarium drinker” and it sounds like nonsense until you realize it’s the most precise description of twenty-first century citizenship anyone has written. An aquarium drinker. Someone consuming an enclosed, artificial ecosystem and calling it refreshment. Someone swallowing the simulation and being thirsty afterward. The song stumbles and lurches through seven minutes of things falling apart, instruments disagreeing with each other, melodies that start and then seem to forget where they were going. This is not dysfunction. This is accuracy. This is what the national project sounds like from inside when you’re honest about it: something that was once a song and is now several songs playing at once, none of them in the same key, all of them insisting they’re the real one.

“Heavy Metal Drummer” is, against all structural logic, a nostalgic pop song about being young in a parking lot in the Midwest, summer, cheap beer, a metal show you’re not even inside of, just adjacent to. “I miss the innocence I’ve known, playing Kiss covers beautiful and stoned.” The production gives it just enough grain that the nostalgia registers as already gone even while it’s being celebrated. The memory is on tape. The tape has hiss. And the parking lot, wherever it was, is a CVS now, and the kids who would have been in it are either in the military or in debt or both, and the summer still comes every year to the Midwest and has less and less to offer the people who survive it.

Reprise Records rejected the finished album. “Uncommercial.” Tweedy asked for the masters back. He streamed it for free. Nonesuch signed the band. Nonesuch and Reprise are both subsidiaries of Warner Music Group. The same corporate parent paid for the album, rejected it, and paid again to release it after the audience did the market research for free. If you wanted a single anecdote to explain how capital works in America you could stop here. The system does not have taste. The system does not have values. The system has a mechanism for determining what is profitable, and when that mechanism fails, it simply buys the correction and calls it strategy. This is not a music industry problem. This is the country. The same country that defunded the Midwest and then, twenty years later, sent politicians to win elections by mourning its decline. You broke it and then you ran on fixing it. The system’s only genius is making its own failures into new products.

But there’s another version of the story that’s less funny, which is that the album about being left behind was itself left behind by its own industry, and the mechanism that saved it (the internet, free distribution, the disintegration of the very gatekeeping apparatus that had funded the recording) was the same mechanism that would, within a decade, make it nearly impossible for a band from the Midwest to fund a record like this one in the first place. The system that couldn’t distribute the album was replaced by a system that distributes everything and values nothing, which is a different kind of abandonment. The same kind, actually. The factory closes and the jobs go to where labor is cheaper. The label drops the band and the attention goes to where content is cheaper. The logic is identical. The Midwest has been on the wrong end of this logic for fifty years and the only thing that changes is what’s being extracted.

What does it mean to be American in the twenty-first century. The album answers this whether it intended to or not. It means to live in a country that succeeded at something other than what it told you it was doing. It told you it was building a middle class and it was building a market. It told you it was connecting people and it was selling connections. It told you the heartland mattered and it was already drawing up the spreadsheet that proved it didn’t, not enough, not at the margins that justify investment.

It means to be from a place where your father worked at a plant that closed and your mother worked at a hospital that lost its funding and your school consolidated with two other schools because the tax base couldn’t support three anymore and the consolidated school is worse and everyone knows it’s worse and the state knows it’s worse and the solution, every time, is a tax incentive for a company that takes the incentive and leaves in eight years. It means to watch your town get written about in the New York Times once every four years, in October, when someone from the coast drives through to take the temperature of Real America, and the article is always the same article, and the diner is always the same diner, and your neighbors put on their best reasonable faces and say things they think the reporter wants to hear, and the reporter leaves, and nothing changes, and the article runs, and someone in Brooklyn reads it and feels something, briefly, and then turns the page.

“Poor Places” closes the album and Tweedy sings “it’s my whole life in a weight that’s way too small” and that’s it, that’s the whole thing. Your whole life in a weight that’s way too small. A life that is full and real and yours, compressed into a data point, a county, a demographic, a line item that some analyst in Washington can zero out without ever having to look at what the number stood for. The song dissolves into static and the numbers station comes back and the woman keeps reading her alphabet and the album ends the way the Midwest enters the twenty-first century: still here, still populated, still real, and already written off.