Wilco Advertised Its New Album as ‘Country.’ It’s Not, Exactly, But There’s a Reason We Still Care About Genre (Column)
variety.comChris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticFor the last 25 years, almost, the group Wilco has been running away from any sort of descriptive tag that has “country” in it, as a suffix or anything else, after Jeff Tweedy’s previous band, Uncle Tupelo, helped kick off the wave of alt-country that continues to be a fixture of modern American music as we know it.
Of course, no matter how far they strayed, if you had ears to hear, the influence never really went away. Now, ironically and deliberately, they’ve done a 180 and embraced that qualifier, with some qualifications, in an album titled “Cruel Country,” preceded by an entire essay Tweedy wrote explaining why they’d stopped trying to get rid of the albatross around their neck and, for the length of this record, at least, re-embraced country music.
So now that the Wilco-loving world has heard “Cruel Country,” which came out this weekend, does it actually sound like a country album, or most people’s idea of one?
Yes, you could say, for two or three or maybe even four songs out of its 21-song length. But the shortest answer is: No, not so much.
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