'Yankee Hotel Foxtrot'

There is not a more quintessential album in the post-9/11 United States.

The album is eerily poignant even nine years after the fact. The songs were written and the music composed well before some asshole terrorists flew some planes into some buildings in Washington, D.C. and New York City. However, in my brain, nothing captured the pulse and attitude of the United States following Sept. 11, 2001.

The album was streamed for free online (as the band were without a label) in September 2001. It was released some seven months later in 2002. I don't know what life was like in April 2002. As I remember, a lot of things were kinda back to normal. I never felt I was going to die in an attack. But I didn't think I'd log in to the Internet and see another story of airplanes and skyscrapers.

In history, we often define certain areas of art based on events like wars and signature moments that somehow defined a vast collection of years. It might take us 30 years to understand culture in the post-9/11 America and it might not be very pretty.

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot -- should they create some museum -- should be perpetually played over the loudspeakers. I'd dare you not to listen to Ashes of American Flags and not be brought to the most humblest of states while watching footage of that morning on the island of Manhattan.

I dare you not to listen to Heavy Metal Drummer and picture the decade of frivolity that preceded Sept. 11, 2001.

Listen to War and War and not think about our troops loaded on the Iraqi border.

Furthermore, this was not only a seminal record in American culture or even in rock music (it made the best-of lists for a vast majority of critics), but for the band. They dumped the country-rock thing and recorded experimental, jazz-fusiony, jam rock that propelled them to their current state and the existing stable of talented musicians pushing them onward. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot did what it did to the country to the band itself.