Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#1 Wilco, YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT

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vs.

#32 Mary J. Blige, NO MORE DRAMA

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To vote, follow this link to the Google Form. You will need a Google login to vote. If you can’t or won’t have one, let me know ASAP (either through this newsletter, my email [[email protected]] or on the Best Album Brackets Bluesky account) and I’ll see what I can do.

Before we get to the Designated Cheerleader, a reminder: We have entered Round 3! The choices will start getting more difficult, and what’s more, we’re very close to the end of the tournament — only about 30 more matches left!

We have one Designated Cheerleader today, it’s for YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT, and it’s from @joshksky.bsky.social. Take it away, Josh!

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is full of last gasps. Many are ordinary rock ‘n’ roll heartache—what was I thinking when I let go of you? but of course it’s got the end of the American century on its mind, too. Greil Marcus was the first writer to call my attention to the parallel in the album’s opening to The Adventures of Augie March (“I am an American, Chicago born”) and that was in a curt dismissal. But Augie was just starting out. No one wants to hear that the party’s over.

I played YHF for my wife for the first time not long ago, driving back through the Valley heat from Malibu. “I wasn’t really listening to white boys with guitars when this came out,” she said. “I was dancing.” But she knew all the songs. Wilco come from American rock, but so did Pet Sounds. You can hear Brian Wilson and the Beatles’ hot pursuit of him in the opening minute of the album. Right there, after the drums bang in and the bass swings up.

Tweedy’s lyrical trick is to bash romantic yearning against American restlessness and through that mix suggestive nonsense. It yields half the time a souffle, half the time a quilt, and half the time a synthesis, to say nothing of the synthesizers. The band’s sound cracks open American rock and fills it with molten noise. It’s kintsugi but it’s not safe to touch. All these sounds have already been heard. Tape decay is progressive. The noise will overtake the sweetness someday, but we get to hold onto this moment, here at the end.

I spent a Saturday afternoon in my late middle twenties recovering from the pills and bad feelings of an “ugly and miserable night,” as my ex later described it at the end of our marriage. A friend played me his new CD. I hadn’t even heard the band before — I much later put together the familiar voice from Uncle Tupelo, which I used to play a lot out in the desert — and the record replaced a mineral that had become depleted in me. I was broken down and receptive that afternoon. Maybe I would have fallen in love with the other album on the board too, but probably not.

It’s not just that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is the best album in the tournament. It’s not just that it’s also my favorite (how could it be any different? ask those of you with incomprehensible confidence in your own taste). It’s not even that it’s the best rock album of the 21st century. It’s that it’s the last great rock album, a tribute in content and form to the final exhaustion of a short, great art form. Its gestures and poses remain free for restaging in good rock ‘n’ roll fun, but will never again be the spirit of the age. Another great rock album may come along, but the world that makes it will be unrecognizable to even our children.

Thank you, Josh!

Click here to see the current results for the entire tournament, and click here to see the current results for the prediction bracket contest.

Yesterday, #22 System of a Down, TOXICITY defeated #43 Josie and the Pussycats, JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS: MUSIC FROM THE MOTION PICTURE, 105-97-2.

Thanks,

Kent