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Originally Posted by path12
Of course any list is going to be subjective, but don't you think your last statement here contradicts your first?
Personally, I find Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to be miles above anything else Wilco has done, regardless of the label shenanigans that went on with the release. Again, ymmv.
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Well, I prefer my music to be pleasing first on an auditory level and not because it's attached to deeper meaning. I have no problem with people who put that album in their top 5. I do have a problem when their entire write-up for why it was #2 is based on what it meant and not how it sounds.
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On that level, Yankee has come to represent everything that’s wrong with the music business: tone-deaf executives, a gross misunderstanding of online music, an institutionalized pandering to the lowest common denominator that obstructed the release of a timeless rock classic. And yet, on another level, Yankee’s success means that the system works. The record did come out, full of glorious static and muffled drums and conflicted patriotism. People did buy it. Wilco’s frontman, Jeff Tweedy, got to keep his ambiguous lyrics—he got to start the album by singing “I am an American aquarium drinker,” and after a while that didn’t seem so very weird. Everyone pretty much got it. “Some of it at the time seemed very topical,” Bither says. “Here we were with a record that was being toured for the first time and performed for the first time literally days after 9/11. … That moment, those months, were a time when we were looking not for answers, certainly, but looking for questions.”
The album asked questions both of its audience and its corporate backers. And the response told us everything we needed to know about the music industry in the 2000s.
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I'd be willing to bet that if YHF was originally released in a normal manner instead them being dropped and the album streamed for free it wouldn't have garnered nearly the attention or acclaim it did. Because people behind lists like this couldn't clap themselves on the back for being cooler than the major labels.