[Ariel Kitch]

Part of what he was is a part of me now.

Uncle Tupelo, D. Boon

Part One: Kids and Kidsmoke

Wilco will always be too traditional for those who want them to be weird, and too weird for those who want them to be traditional. For all the hype about its sonic experiments, 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot can still break your heart into twin towers mainly because of Jeff Tweedy’s arresting songs. Yet to certain hipsters—call them peasants with their Pitchforks—Tweedy has since become the archetypal boring dad, leading a mythical genre known as dad rock.

Tweedy does seems like a devoted dad. This July, he smiled warmly when his son (heavy metal drummer Spencer) came onstage in Berkeley dressed like one of the Fleet Foxes. But the haters are getting ugly. Vice offered Wilco fans the sensitive advice that “you might as well sterilize yourselves, because if you have kids they are guaranteed to be assholes too.” Reviewing this year’s Wilco (The Album) the Village Voice trash-talked Tweedy as “a pale father of two” who makes music for white people to relax.

The notion that “dad rock” is a bad thing brings out the fighting side of me. I am a pale father of two. I wash dishes and mow the lawn, though not particularly well. I find myself trying to “balance fun with crushing depression,” just like Tweedy. Despite the occasional bad haircut or twelve-minute migraine, Tweedy has special gifts. He channels the Replacements and the Carter Family. He croaks strange poetry in gorgeously cranky second-generation Dylanisms. He hallucinates about spiders doing tax returns to the tune of Can’s “Mother Sky.” If Wilco is the new “normal,” my life is a David Lynch movie.

Wilco, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”

Part Two: So Misunderstood

I wish I’d been a fly on the wall in the meeting brainstorming the cover art for Wilco’s new eponymous disc, destined to be known as The Camel Album:

Record executive: “Jeff, we’ve got a problem. People are starting to think you’re a tired fossil who has no rock and roll fun.”

Tweedy: “Wait, I’ve got it! Let’s give them a fez-wearing camel with an enormous birthday cake! And let’s have the photo shoot at Mader’s Restaurant in Milwaukee, home of the Schnitzelbank drinking song! Beer-loving Lutherans will love us once again, especially once they discover that Bon Iver is really the Unabomber.”

I love that, after getting lambasted with the “dad rock” label, Wilco chose to use a children’s birthday party theme on the cover. Despite more ups and downs than the camel, Wilco (The Album) is a truckload of fun for dads of all ages. Once in a while, as with Sky Blue Sky, it could use one of Tweedy’s frenemies named Jay — Jay Farrar, or the sadly departed Jay Bennett — to give Tweedy a kick in the pants and keep things moving. The album won’t bring back the Neil Young Country of Being There, the lush chamber pop of Summerteeth, or the fractured anthems of Foxtrot. But it draws memorably from all the Wilcos we have known, as well as a few of their heroes. Here’s a sampling of the new tracks, with accompanying sermonette and source material:

Waiting for My Van

The taut, chunky guitars plugging along at the start of “Wilco (The Song)” reveal it as a dad-friendly reworking of the Velvet Underground’s “Waiting for the Man.” But rather than going to Lexington and 125th to buy drugs, like Lou Reed, Tweedy sounds more like he’s on the prowl for a neighborhood featuring tree-lined streets and an excellent school system. Pure genius. But it gets better. He refers to his own band in the song, like he’s in Wang Chung telling everybody to wang chung tonight. And instead of trying to break your heart, he throws out warm fuzzies. “Wilco will love ya, baby,” he intones, like he’s Telly Savalas. And who among us doesn’t need a dad-friendly hybrid of the Velvet Underground, Wang Chung and Telly Savalas?

Wilco, “Wilco (The Song)”

Velvet Underground, “Waiting for the Man”

Bull Black Volvo

Those who think Tweedy is now only serving happy meals should listen to “Bull Black Nova,” The Album’s chilly melodrama in the tradition of “Via Chicago” and “Spiders (Kidsmoke).” Tweedy and superlative lead guitarist Nels Cline build a high-wire frenzy that sounds like a lost track from Television’s Marquee Moon. But Television’s Cadillac pulled into the graveyard in different times, when General Motors wasn’t yet a public works program. There’s nothing remotely dad rock about a Chevy Nova, which probably doesn’t even have airbags. I want Tweedy to write his next murder mystery about my Volvo V70 station wagon.

Wilco, “Bull Black Nova”

Television, “Marquee Moon”

Bastards of Old

“You Never Know” is shimmering power pop in Wilco’s Summerteeth tradition, sounding like Big Star playing something from George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. Then the lyrics kick in, and they deserve a hallowed place in the dad rock hall of fame: “Come on children, you’re acting like children/ Every generation thinks it’s the end of the world.” As I blurted out to my six year-old girl last week: “Will you please stop acting like a child?” Wilco gets it, and I feel so validated.

(The flip side of the “You Never Know” seven-inch single is Unlikely Japan, a version of Sky’s “Impossible Germany” that sounds more like a Foxtrot outtake).

Wilco, “You Never Know”

George Harrison, “What is Life”

Wilco (The Duet)

Jeff launches into lullaby mode on “You and I,” proving those crib-side crooning sessions with his boys weren’t in vain. Then, faster than you can count to four, Canadian mathematician Leslie Feist joins in for a little game of She & Him, with Feist playing the role of Zooey Deschanel while Tweedy turns into Matt Ward. A shade too cute, but it’s dad-tastic!

Wilco (with Feist), “You and I”

She and Him, “This is Not a Test”

Part Three: A Can of Spiders

Spiders are singing in the salty breeze
Spiders are filling out tax returns
Spinning out webs of deductions and melodies
On a private beach in Michigan

Why can’t they wish their kisses good
Why do they miss when their kisses should
Fly like winging birds fighting for the keys
On a private beach in Michigan

This recent rash of kidsmoke
All these telescopic poems
It’s good to be alone

Wilco, “Spiders (Kidsmoke)”

Can, “Mother Sky”

For a long time after I first saw spoken-word artist Sarah Palin recite for a national audience, part of me doubted her existence. I have nothing against regional dialect poetry, and hers hasn’t suffered from lack of attention. Last fall, the Utne Reader described her work as beat poetry, comparing her Katie Couric interview line-by-line with works by Ginsberg and Kerouac. In Salon, Camille Paglia, the Sarah Palin of essayists, described her Alaskan counterpart’s style as “closer to street rapping than to the smug bourgeois cadences of the affluent professional class.”

Still, I remained skeptical. Palin’s ice-fogged persona—equal parts Northern Exposure and Manchurian Candidate—seemed too calculated to be credible to all but the most serious Ted Nugent fans. It didn’t help that the author of her signature convention speech is a vegetarian animal rights activist, or that the names of her six children (Snipp, Snapp, Snurr, Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka) sounded too familiar. I kept waiting for the J.T. Leroy/ James Frey-type moment that would blast her story in a million little pieces, revealing “Sarah Palin” to be the creation of a bored Berkeley creative writing student, or Tina Fey’s older sister.

But Palin is indeed real, and the past month has shown that I clearly misunderestimated her artistic skill. A governor is a lot like a performance artist, but with actual responsibilities. With her recent resignation, Palin has brilliantly freed herself from the chores of governance. Much like the title character in the children’s story Duck for President, she will find that quitting frees up time to work on her memoirs and give speeches only other ducks can understand. Her farewell rant in Alaska, which many found inscrutable, ranks as a surrealist tour de force, sledding over the icy tundra of grammar and diction like an American Idiotarod of freestyle improvisation.

Even better, late last month on Conan O’Brien’s show, “master thespian” and Canadian mind-control expert William Shatner performed cover versions of Palin’s farewell speech and Twitter posts. Palin joined a select few over several decades–notably, the Beatles, Dylan and Pulp–deemed worthy of Shatner covers (remarkably, Shatner is six years older than John McCain). For those like me put off by Palin’s chirpy delivery of her own material, Shatner’s covers were a revelation. Following up on his moving and poignant 2004 masterpiece Has Been, Shatner used his martini-dry delivery to make Palin’s words boldly go where no prose has gone before, peeking at the “big wild good life teeming along the road that is north to the future.” Or, as one of Palin’s tweets makes perfectly clear:

Left Unalakleet warmth for rain in Juneau tonite. No drought threat down here, ever…but consistent rain reminds us: “No rain? No rainbow!”

William Shatner, performing Sarah Palin’s Tweets

I doubt that even Shatner knows the first thing about splitting the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs. But his spinning salad of Palin’s prose added a new layer of intrigue. I briefly recalled Ken Nordine’s worldly and other-worldy word-jazz. Even more, I thought of the surrealist beat poet Ted “The Hipster” Joans. As poets, Joans and Palin are a little like Captain Ahab chasing his nemesis: Joans’ Moby Dick was Dave Brubeck; for Palin, it’s Barack Obama. Joans’ credo was “jazz is my religion, and surrealism is my point of view”; for Palin, religion is her jazz and surrealism is her language. Joans spoke of poems as “hand grenades” meant to “explode on the enemy and the unhip”; Palin uses poems as hand grenades to explode on the unrighteous. Joans said “you have nothing to fear from the poet but the truth”; we have nothing to fear from Sarah Palin but her lies.

Ted Joans, “Jazz is My Religion”

Most of all, listening to Shatner’s take on Palin made me think of his encounter with another feisty, dangerous brunette a generation earlier in the 1967 Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever. I’m no Trekkie, but if Shatner had a moment as a master thespian, this is it. Due to a deliciously preposterous alteration of history which forces the crew to go forward into the past, Shatner’s character, Captain James T. Kirk, is transported into the United States in the 1930s, where he has to choose between saving humanity from Hitler and hooking up with Joan Collins. In the sixties, this was apparently considered something of a close call. Love and hormones almost get the best of Kirk, but in the end justice triumphs.

As aired, City on the Edge of Forever enraged Harlan Ellison, author of the original script for the episode. The TV episode suggests Collins’ character, a Depression Era do-gooder named Edith Keeler, was supposed to be killed in traffic accident. But unless corrected, the accidental change in history would spare her life, allowing her to spearhead a pacifist movement delaying U.S. entry into World War II. That delay would then have permitted the Nazis to develop the atomic bomb first and conquer the world. When the episode aired at the height of the Vietnam War, the antiwar Ellison disliked having an unsubtle bird flipped at the peace movement against his wishes.

Listening to Shatner’s performances last month made me think of a more contemporary moment at the edge of forever. All kidding aside, Sarah Palin could conceivably become President. I’d bet against it, but I remember how far-fetched it once seemed that we would have Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jesse Ventura as governors. At a time when climate change is already occurring and Alaskan glaciers are melting with surprising speed, having a President who once said she was “not one who would attribute” global warming as “being man-made” could recklessly alter history—not our past, but our future. Describing Edith Keeler’s commitment to peace, Spock in City on the Edge tells Kirk, “She was right. But at the wrong time.” By contrast, Sarah Palin is wrong, and at the wrong time.

Star Trek, “The City on the Edge of Forever”

William Shatner, “Common People”