Pitchfork

In the current issue of Bookforum, Jeff Tweedy, who has been documented referencing a certain darling quartet by changing the refrain of "Heavy Metal Drummer" to "Playing Joy Division covers, beautiful and alone," says: "The circuit between Justin Timberlake and a fourteen year-old girl is what's really important about music, and... that connection is more profound than the one between an Interpol record and a fifty-year-old rock critic." Whuh-oh! Holy Christgau! The Tweedist notes that if a scientist from the future came to visit us (why not a Terminator, Jeff?) that "N*SYNC would tell him more about our culture than any Will Oldham record." (Ahem, females have made remarkable advances in science-careering, there, Cap'n Foxtrot.) Then he half-disses Wilco! Have fourteen years of high-profile music-making got my boy all discombobulated? If he's truly under the spell of über-pop's nauseous gravity, something tells me he'd find the hullabaloo over his remastered, bonus-track-befattened early work with Joltin' Jay Farrar a tad unremarkable. And I'll admit: the worth of these discs to anyone not already a Tupelo tutee will depend on whether your response to monoliths is an infantilizing, golly-bum wonderment, or an urge to pull a Jello Biafra and tinkle on the shriney behemoths.

Let me set the scene for the cultural landscape when Uncle Tupelo busted out: The cassingle shelves were still reeling from the layered grooves of Neneh Cherry's "Buffalo Stance". People were fascinated with the psychological underpinnings of evil-twin absorption due to Stephen King's scouring of the subject in The Dark Half. Filmgoers finally learned what happened after Chris Lloyd's unforgettable Doc flew away in the garbage-fueled hovercar; and to tell the truth, we were underwhelmed by Cyborg Biff, Western Biff, and the absence of Crispin Glover as the fitful McFly patriarch. The scene was clearly set for a pair of Illinois malcontents to usurp and enhance a country sound that had already been fangled by folks from places as far away as California, some quite well (Rank & File, Green on Red, etc).

The "heartland" was suffering as usual from Bookended Syndrome, penned (if one can be penned in vastness) between all manner of paisley undergrounds and post-punk revivals. And even the South had that whole "Southern" brand to promulgate. So these two prophets of the twang-blast complaint-jam, Tweedy and Farrar, successfully tractorjacked a style of delivery, reappropriating it for the midwest, further secularizing its good-versus-evil conceits (which already hinted at man-versus-machine struggles) by installing a new industrial devilry. No Depression is, of course, the album that spawned a webboard, a magazine, and a movement (if "movement" is an accurate word to describe a music largely about sitting around, watching trains go by, inhaling silo rust, drinking, and feeling grandiosely bummed). What's beautiful is that the expression isn't Unkie's but A.P. Carter's, from Toop's cover of his economic theodicy "No Depression in Heaven"-- one of two Carter covers that beg for hill-cred on this hyperactive debut. (While we're being infinitely tangential, consult Mark Zwonitzer and Charles Hirshberg's excellent page-turner Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone for a history of the spastic and rambling A.P., the father of country who stole as many songs as he wrote.)

Reissues, though, demand to be examined in terms of how they "hold up," and No Depression's reputation seems vestigial, especially next to its follow-up, Still Feel Gone. Sure, "Screen Door" is a damn good skittle of misfitude, but elsewhere the boys sound like they haven't grown into their coveralls, and they were certainly yet to discover subtlety. Tweedy's faked southern accent can induce smirks, and Farrar's spoofable earnestness might have you bellowing about assembly lines into your Body Shop hempbrush. No Depression is innovative for about thirteen minutes, after which it's sorely redundant. The sophomore album is so much stronger-- it sounds like a fourth or fifth album-- that one wonders why the bash-n-crop genre these guys spawned isn't called "feelgone." In addition to how Still Feel Gone's spectacular drums and (cliché alert-- but they earn it) "blistering solos" benefit the most from the digital refurbish, the band had settled into its song structures: the lyrics, though still awful slogany, are less strained (especially the part about "walking cancerous miles"), the banjo backdrops are better timed, and the shifts from harmonica and acousti-pliddle into Hüsker Dü-dom are more organic. This album is a slightly wiser No Depression with plenty of power steering fluid.

Though definitely saddle-punk, Still Feel Gone is interestingly the least country Tupelo record, due to its trad-coverlessness, its Minutemen tribute "D. Boon", its heavy-handed production by the Fort Apache crew (who knobbed everyone into Boston-fodder a la Dino Jr and Buffalo Tom), its genius opener "Gun" (on which Tweedy synthesizes the entirety of The Replacements' Tim), and its genius closer "If That's Alright" (on which Tweedy lays the groundwork for what would become known as the grunge ballad). How did it become conventional wisdom that Farrar was the better songwriter? Much of his stuff is prosaic and melody-less; he may have better pipes than Jethco, but his homemade Stipe-Mellencamp-Linnell-Rollins smoothie can get hoary and grate.

Oh snap: The boys then hooked up with newly mandolin-competent producer Peter Buck, fresh from losing his religion and wearing vests over blouses, to record, in the actual South, their least characteristic but by far best album. (Sorry, Anodyne fans-- call me revisionist, but that out-n-back disc hardly sounds like a unified band. You can practically hear Tweedy sizing up new member Stirratt's mutiny-mettle. Even Still Feel Gone predicts a future schism, as any careful listener can detect seedlings of the irreconcilable differences between Farrar's insistence on gestures of meaningfulness and Tweedy's burgeoning nihilism.) Forty percent rearranged traditionals and covers, March 16-20, 1992 strove for a porchiness that risked hokum, but thankfully, Buck rendered the project pristine; you'd think it were laid down in some soundproof gazebo outside an all-retiree church. The acoustic guitar has rarely sounded better than it does here.

This record's Geffen-be-damned songs against capitalism and Danzig-be-damned songs against Satan helped to make Tupelo the favorite uncle of many a bandwagon purist. The not-quite bluegrass of Tweedy's tearjerker "Wait Up" stands as one of the band's most inventive moments, and slowcore owes a debt to the almost-undrummable version of murderer's lament "Lilli Schull". (This review will now acknowledge the stickwork of Mike Heidorn. The man kept the fuggin beat.) Farrar tormentedly taps into some woodland ghost on his rendition of Dylan's rendition of the anonymous "Moonshiner" (since revisited by Cat Power, who rightfully added a verse about wanting to tour hell). The songs about hard labor and unionbusting on March transcend the almost-quaint pre-NAFTA factory sentiments that underscore the first two albums. Tupelo's decidedly unescapist catalog reaches its apex in these oppression anthems, which, eleven years later, still haunt as mottoes of a perennially defeated army (and Wilco would, of course, go on to double-honor workingman's minstrel Woody Guthrie). Surely gazillionaire Buck was so enraptured by the blacklung alchemy underfoot that he could have never guessed that something called Wilco would tour with R.E.M., or that he'd play with the lauded troupe on a record called Down With them.

I'm the rare bitch who resents bonus tracks. They violate the sequencing of classic albums; imagine how a film's coherence would be disrupted if the "deleted scenes" played right after the denouement (consult the recent ripoff Forever Changes, though I won't complain about the mid-90s Ryko reissues of Bowie and Costello). This triad boasts the usual, serviceable smattering of faster versions, slower versions, live versions, and rare covers. Standouts include the unbelievably naptime-then-thunderous "Sauget Wind", among the band's top five songs, and proof that a fallen tree in the forest makes a bustass sound even if Albini didn't mic it. Two covers that should have been included on albums are "I Wanna Destroy You" (especially now that The Soft Boys are, um, soft) and Iggy's "I Wanna Be Your Dog". These awesome homages would have broken up the austerity of Tupelo's humorless albums; one of my record-store coworkers once tossed March across the sales floor, proclaiming, "I can't take their seriousness anymore, man: I'm trying to digest a hot dog, and I gotta live." An aborted, hidden cover of the theme from The Waltons constitutes the ultimate pop-south surrender, though the show's atheist dad remains an inspiration.

Funny how Tweedy went on to be the John The Baptist of futro folk-rock, while Farrar's last project was a (vocal-less, natch) score for a film about the homoerotic subtext of football. Though this band spent two albums raving about beer and entropy, and could be skimpy on imagery, they rocked at a better ratio than they didn't. But is being the forebearers of a genre whose proponents average two good songs per album really something to be proud of? All we need now is for some statistician to ascertain why No Depression is loved by a disproportionate amount of people with mustaches.