The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Friday, November 15, 2019 — 5A

On Tuesday, Nov. 5, Wilco took to the stage 
at Hill Auditorium for a stop on their Ode 
to Joy tour, following a strong opening set 
by Deep Sea Diver (featuring a particularly 
enthusiastic and capable drummer). The 
opener “Bright Leaves” set the tone for most 
of the evening — relaxed and melancholy. 
Ode to Joy, while perhaps the strongest 
project Wilco has released since The Whole 
Love (2012), does not translate well to a 
live show. The album is fairly low-energy, 
more suited to background listening than 
to a concert performance. Most of the cuts 
from that album felt obligatory, given that 
the tour is nominally in support of it. Wilco 
played “Citizens” live for the first and, God 
willing, last time ever. Luckily, they included 
plenty of crowd-pleasing numbers off of their 
earlier albums as well. Highlights of their set 
included a moving rendition of “Jesus, Etc,” a 
face-melting version of “At Least That’s What 
You Said,” and an unexpected yet gorgeous 
performance of the sparse “Reservations.” 
In contrast, their decision not to play what 
is by far their second-most popular song 
(“California Stars”) was curious yet powerful. 
They reeled off almost thirty songs in total; 
concertgoers certainly got their money’s 
worth in that respect. 
Nels Cline is one of the most talented 
guitarists of his generation. If you hadn’t been 
aware of that entering Hill Auditorium, you 
were certainly aware of it by the time you left. 
He fired off blistering solo after solo, a truly 
impressive display. That said, I think he is far 
from alone in the unfortunate belief that the 

amount and frequency of notes you play in a 
given amount of time are directly correlated 
with the quality of a guitar solo. At a certain 
point, the melody is neglected in favor of 
technical prowess, and it begins to feel as 
though I’m watching a gymnastic exhibition 
rather than a musical performance.
Jeff Tweedy cuts an unassuming figure on 
stage, his relaxed demeanor likely a product of 
over 30 years of experience. His interactions 
with the audience were minimal yet radiated 
a quiet confidence. Tweedy gently ribbed the 
crowd for being low-energy a few times during 
the set — with the exception of the people at 
the front who rocked out for just about every 
song (and who Jeff Tweedy lightheartedly 
accused of sneaking in alcohol), the audience 
was barely capable of remaining on their feet, 
let alone displaying any sort of passionate 
enjoyment of the music. Unfortunately, this 
was not the case with the man behind me who 
doggedly clapped along enthusiastically to 
each song, unaccompanied and offbeat.
While Hill Auditorium is undoubtedly a 
beautiful venue with superb acoustic qualities, 
I have never seen a show there that was not 
lacking in crowd energy. I attribute this to a 
combination of the older clientele it attracts 
as well as the cramped layout of the seating, 
which does not provide sufficient space for the 
audience to stand up and get into the music. 
Diehard Wilco fans will undoubtedly have 
left Hill Auditorium satisfied, while more 
casual listeners likely enjoyed the experience 
but could have gone for less extended guitar 
freakouts (e.g. “We Were Lucky”). A few 
questionable setlist choices aside, it was a 
largely pleasing performance; a nice snapshot 
of a band, and its audience, ageing gracefully 
together.

Wilco at Hill was a little bit
boring, but also pleasing? 

GETTY IMAGES

CONCERT REVIEW

JONAH MENDELSON
Daily Arts Writer

In the house where I spent my first ten years, 
there was a big stove and oven contraption set 
into the wall of the kitchen. The behemoth was 
surrounded by terracotta tiles, Tuscan floral 
reliefs that only the seventies could produce. It was 
a suburban fantasy that any housewife would cry 
before. The stove, in its cave of orange sunflowers, 
had little red lights near the knobs of each of the 
burners to tell when they were hot, as most stoves 
do. My first experience of being burned came as a 
result of this.
When my parents got married, they received a 
perfectly-curated set of kitchen supplies including 
several shiny Calphalon pots and pans. We ate a 
lot of pasta. Every time my mom would boil water 
for dinner, I would sit in front of the stove as she 
cooked, entranced by the red light that reflected 
up onto each pot’s perfect silver surface. This went 
on for months when I was around four years old 
until I finally worked up the courage to see what 
those lights truly were. I waited until she moved to 
the other side of the kitchen to grab the butter and 
went for the prize. My hand reached out slowly as 
I stared at the red swirl of the light in an almost 
hypnotic trance. I smelled barbecue and suddenly 
felt a jolt of pain run up my arm. 
“Clara!” My mother exclaimed. I felt tears 
running down my face as I realized what had 
happened. Of course it wasn’t a ghost orb or some 
fancy jewel, I said to my four-year-old self, and 
now I have to wear a Band-Aid. 
In that hundred-year-old house with the bay 
window, I grew up happily, for the most part. 
There is a tendency to romanticize what you 
can’t completely remember, but the snippets of 
summer in that home are something I have always 
treasured. 
The only problem was that we were in Michigan, 
a state whose reputation is relegated to few things 
other than Detroit, lakes, cherries and brutal 
winters. Every year, like clockwork, the snow 
would blanket that house like a low-hanging fog, 
draping the stucco in a dreamlike curtain of cold. 
My parents would climb out onto the flat roof of 
our mudroom to cut ice off of the asphalt surface, 
pushing it past the ornate windowpanes and into 
the frost. I watched in awe as they managed not 
to fall off and die, as they warned we would if my 
siblings and I even thought about mimicking them. 
But even when the ice melted, when the birds 
came back out and we started to have a groundhog 
breeding problem again, my hands stayed cold.
They say in the laws of thermodynamics that 
cold is not a concept on its own — instead, it is 
the absence of heat. If that is true, my whole life 
has been devoted to chasing what I don’t have. 
Although my mother did not believe me until 
high school, we share the same genetic syndrome 
called Raynaud’s, a minor yet annoying affliction 
that prevents blood from circulating completely 
through our hands and feet. Because of this, I will 
most definitely have cold feet on the night before 
my wedding and every other night of my life, too. 
Maybe that’s part of why I have been burned so 
many times, from that moment in the kitchen at 
age four to a curling-iron mishap only two weeks 
ago. I don’t feel a fire until I smell smoke, and I 
don’t realize I’ve been burned until it’s too late to 
go back.

There has been a fireplace in every home my 
family’s lived in, and I have always sat too close, 
waiting in front of the flames until I couldn’t 
stand it anymore. When the temperature drops 
each year, I prepare myself for the inevitable 
white fingertips I’ll end up with after five minutes 
outside, the numbness, the apologies I’ll make for 
my vampirish touch. My friends have taken to 
calling me “skeleton woman” every time I grab 
them, my pale hands like ice on their skin. They 
recoil, and my stomach flips over inside my core as 
I wonder if I’ll ever hold someone in comfort. 
I’ve always remained at a cool 97 degrees, even 
when I wanted to be anything else. My fevers only 
reach 100, and I was always sent to school as a sick 
child because of this. My mother texts me “are 
you staying warm?” on an almost-daily basis. It’s 
laughable the way that heat, or the lack of it, has 
colored my life. The first time I dated a boy I really, 
truly liked, I avoided public affection in fear of his 
response to my temperature. He wanted to hold 
hands on the street, and I feigned an arm cramp. 
I almost burned myself again trying to warm up 
my freezing fingers with a hairdryer before dinner 
one night. We kissed, we laid next to each other, I 
strategically hung my feet off the edge of the bed.
It’s stupid, childish, for me to do these things, 
but I always fear what my aura of cold will tell 
someone what my own words don’t: that I’m 
nervous, uninterested, that my heart isn’t beating 
a million miles a minute when that should be clear. 
Those who know me would describe me as warm, 
but my body doesn’t hear it. Instead, I sit by the 
radiator, by the space heater, by the fire. But at least 
there are glimpses into the heat that my blood is 
supposed to run at, a signal that I’m still alive. 
And I think that’s the thing that really scares 
me: If being human is wrapped up in our heat, our 
passion, anger, love, what does it mean to be cold? 
Am I any less alive because my touch doesn’t say 
so? I have fought for my life as it is, through illness 
and unhappiness, but it seems that my body hasn’t 
caught up yet. When that day comes, there will be a 
celebration within me. But for now, I will wait and 
live, even if my hands feel like those of a corpse.

The winter lurking within

NOTEBOOK

CLARA SCOTT
Daily Gender & Media Columnist

When I first heard Wiki featured on Run The Jewels’s “Blockbuster 
Night Pt. 2” and Earl Sweatshirt’s “AM // Radio,” I was pretty stoked 
— he reeked of the underground hip-hop sound that I vibed with so 
hard. Then his first solo tape, Lil Me, dropped, and its mediocrity 
eradicated all my interest in the up-and-coming New York rapper 
with the quirky 
drawl. I passed 
over his debut 
and never really 
dived into his 
past work with 
Ratking. 
But 
I would never 
skip 
anything 
with 
Madlib’s 
footprint 
on 
it, 
so 
when 
Wiki 
dropped 
the 
Madlib-
produced 
“Eggs” 
last 
September, 
I 
was excited to 
see him bring 
his A-game.
Right away, OOFIE doesn’t set itself up for success. “Downfall” is 
a standard “I failed but I swear I’m bringing it back this time” type 
track, not unlike something you might find on an Eminem album. 
It’s unclear what failure he’s talking about: Maybe disappointment 
with himself because he’s never had a break-out single or album, 
although that doesn’t seem like the kind of worry Wiki would 
have. Regardless of what it concerns, hearing themes of self-
disappointment at the very beginning doesn’t set a good tone for 
the album. At best, it’s uninteresting, and at worst, it’s cringe-y 
(remember J. Cole’s “Let Nas Down”?). I want to grab Wiki by the 
collar and say, just show us what you got already!
Digging into the music, most of OOFIE is underwhelming, and 
not in any particularly interesting way. Every song is in a sort of 
weird middle ground where it’s hard to tell if it’s supposed to be a 
chill kickback track or something that slaps in the car. Not that all 
hip hop has to fit neatly into those categories, but the album just 

doesn’t seem very sure-footed in its direction. I think I’m supposed 
to have the windows down in the car during “Pesto” and I think I’m 
supposed to drink a beer on the porch to “The Routine,” but a good 
song should make me think, I can’t wait to blast this in the car or I 
can’t wait to listen to this while I’m chilling with the boys. The only 
thing that crossed my mind was I could probably do the dishes to this.
Something that holds this album back is a lack of progression 
in the production on most of the tracks. Typically the beat you 
hear at the beginning carries the music all the way through. This 
is fine for bite-size tracks but it’s easy to lose interest during your 
typical three-minute-30-second song. Wiki’s focus on making 
lyrical lemonade can only carry a song so far, especially when so 
many lines don’t land well (“When you poppin’ Perkies, she pop her 
pussy / She drop her tushy, she almost hurt me” … really?). None 
of the beats are interesting enough to carry a listener through 
the whole track, which is dangerous — in today’s era of hip hop 
production, lackluster production is a death sentence. Tracks like 
“The Routine” have an interesting, quirky lead sample, but the rest 
of the production doesn’t do it justice. More uninteresting drum 
patterns and woozy, unexciting pads. It’s no wonder the album ends 
up feeling purposeless.
The only beats that are juicy enough to carry through an entire 
song are on “Dame Aqui” and “Way That I Am,” but I still probably 
wouldn’t listen to them 
again if it weren’t for 
their features. Princess 
Nokia blesses the beat 
with her own sixteen 
bars on “Dame Aqui,” 
while Your Old Droog 
and Wiki hold down an 
entertaining back-and-
forth on “Way That I 
Am.” At some point, 
it became clear that I 
was waiting for Wiki to 
finish and his features 
to start. That should 
have been obvious on 
“Grim” where Lil Ugly 
Mane and Denzel Curry 
outshine Wiki to an 
embarrassing degree.
Wiki’s choruses are 
also a stain on every 

song. Typically signified by Wiki layering his vocals, it’s mostly 
annoying. There’s no saving the hook to “4 Clove Club.” It would have 
been more interesting if he went the MF-Doom route and just cut the 
hooks out from the start. I want to give Wiki more credit — some of 
his writing is really slick, like “Grand maestro of the metro / Damn, 
your hand swipes slow, while I get dough” on “Pesto.” It just doesn’t 
have any room to stand out, especially put next to pen game demons 
like Your Old Droog spitting burns like “Lames on Rap Genius 
wanna speak for the God 
like televangelists.”
When it comes down 
to it, OOFIE has only 
convinced me of something 
I was pretty certain I 
already knew: Wiki is a 
feature rapper and doesn’t 
have the creativity to hold 
down a track on his own. 
He fits in a cool niche of 
underground rappers with 
a strong pen game, yeah. 
Your Old Droog fills the 
same space, though, and 
he executes his ideas way 
better. It took a Madlib 
beat to put Wiki back on 
my radar, and it’ll take 
something 
better 
than 
OOFIE to keep him from 
falling off again.

Wiki struggles to hold his own on solo album ‘OOFIE’

ALBUM REVIEW

DYLAN YONO
Daily Arts Writer

OOFIE

Wiki

Wikiset Ltd

WIKISET ENTERPRISE

It took a Madlib beat 
to put Wiki back on 
my radar, and it’ll take 
something better than 
OOFIE to keep him 
from falling off again.

The first time I 
dated a boy that I 
really, truly liked, 
I avoided public 
affection in fear of 
his response to my 
temperature.

