Wilco Advertised Its New Album as ‘Country.’ It’s Not, Exactly, But There’s a Reason We Still Care About Genre (Column)

For 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… Read Full Article