#music history

There is something slightly strange about Louis Armstrong's place in American culture.

Armstrong came out of a musical world that now feels almost archaeological: New Orleans brass bands, ragtime, blues, vaudeville, riverboats, marching-band traditions, and the collective improvisation of the earliest jazz. His mentor was Joe "King" Oliver. He recorded with musicians such as Kid Ory and Johnny Dodds. Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet belonged to roughly the same pioneering generation.

Yet Armstrong somehow kept going.

Not merely in the sense that he continued to work. He remained famous.

By the 1950s he was appearing in movies and on television. In 1964, at age 62, his recording of "Hello, Dolly!" reached number one on the American pop chart, temporarily displacing the Beatles at the height of Beatlemania. Three years later he recorded "What a Wonderful World," the song that for many listeners today is more recognizable than anything from his revolutionary jazz recordings of the 1920s.

This creates an interesting historical question.

Why Armstrong?

Why did one musician from that primordial New Orleans jazz culture travel so much farther into mainstream American popular culture than almost everyone else who came out of it?

Armstrong was not literally the last survivor of early jazz. Some contemporaries lived nearly as long or longer. Nor was he the only astonishing musician the culture produced. But he seems to have accomplished something rarer: he escaped being contained by his own historical period.

There is something peculiar about listening to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot with the dates in mind. Wilco recorded the album largely before September 11, 2001, and delivered it to Reprise in the middle of that year. Yet when the record finally received its conventional release in April 2002, it seemed uncannily suited to the world in which it arrived. Songs were filled with damaged communication, weary affection, American imagery, mechanical interference and moments of almost casual dread. “Jesus, Etc.” contained images of shaking tall buildings and escaping voices. Another song was called “Ashes of American Flags.” The album itself ended with a mysterious radio voice repeating the words “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” through a growing wall of noise. None of this was written in response to September 11, yet after September 11 it became nearly impossible for listeners not to hear at least some of it through that experience. Contemporary and retrospective criticism alike noticed the effect. The catastrophe seemed to have placed a new frame around music that already existed.

It is tempting, for that reason, to treat Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as a prophetic record: an album that somehow sensed what was about to happen. But prophecy is probably the least interesting explanation for what makes it feel so historically charged. Wilco did not anticipate the attacks, and some of the album’s supposedly ominous imagery becomes much less mysterious once the chronology is restored. The better question is why music created before the rupture sounded so natural after it. That question points beyond coincidence and into the cultural atmosphere from which the album emerged. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was made during a period when several transformations were already underway at once: the high confidence of the late 1990s had begun to coexist with increasingly visible unease; rock musicians were pulling familiar songwriting forms apart with noise, electronics and studio manipulation; analog and digital recording technologies were overlapping; and the old record-industry machinery was beginning to collide with a new world in which music could circulate through the Internet whether labels understood the implications or not. September 11 did not create all of those tensions. It made some of them suddenly easier to see.