Did Wilco Do It Again? Or, Mixtapes Can Save Lives

Among all the questions that surround Jared Loughner's shooting spree in Tucson, AZ, I add this one: Did Wilco do it again?

A decade ago, Wilco gained notoriety for the way their Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album captured the Zeitgeist of the 9/11 tragedy.


From the Marina City towers on the album cover that echo the fallen Twin Towers, to verses on 'Jesus, Etc.' like, "sky scrappers scraping together" ... "last cigarettes, all you can get, turning your orbit around", to the elegant dissonance that pocks the album's length-- there is something about YHF that just captures the post traumatic stress of post 9/11 America.

Which is it's cathartic gift.

The amazing thing about all this of course is that Wilco released Yankee Hotel Foxtrot before 9/11 happened.

As Cori Taratoot wrote in 2004 on the Popmatters blog, "Leave it to Wilco to write a 9/11 record, maybe the only one that really mattered, before 9/11 even happened."

So as the story unfolds in Tuscon, and America again tries to comprehend tragedy, one detail among the many to catch my eye is the report that Loughner drove a beat-up 1969 Chevy Nova.

My first thought was, having watched enough Mechum Auto Auctions to know, that 1969 was a good year for Nova's.

Then I went and listened to 'Bull Black Nova' off Wilco (The Album). Eric Swedlund had this review on the Tuscon Weekly website:

"A comforting thank-you love letter to fans, "Wilco (The Song)" kick-starts the
album with the exhilarated urgency of a payday Friday. However, the record's
longest—and most challenging—song is "Bull Black Nova," a veiled and disjointed
murder ballad that's harsh, rigid and relentlessly repetitive at times, spinning
and twisting into a fitful paranoia as it builds to a mesmerizing guitar
freak-out."

Whatever degree you consider Wilco omnipotent-- this much is clear; 'Bull Black Nova' is a song that offers an artist's insight into the disjointed, paranoid thought-process of a murderer. What perhaps makes it so challenging is finding how this song fits not only into this Wilco album, but the entire Wilco canon.

But who knows what would've happened if someone had given Loughner this song to listen to. Maybe he would've keyed in on the words, "this can't be undone, this can't be undone" and thought twice.

Maybe he would have had a cathartic moment over a lyric or even the anxiously dissonant sound, and found in this song a place to compartmentalize and access his personal sufferings from a place of understanding and control.

No way to know that now. But gaining a better understanding of (evolving) human nature-- so that our own thoughts might be less disjointed-- can only help avoid tragedies like Tuscon.