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November 14, 2007

ON AEROPLANE

Most of you who know me, tolerate me, or can’t weasel out of a conversation with me, know about my hideous man-love for Neutral Milk Hotel. It was tumultuous at first for the Hotels and I; I remember hearing about them in 1998, in college, when a lot of my indie-rocker friends swore up and down that they were the new big thing, revolutionizing music, etc. At the time, however, I associated them with a lot of music I didn’t like or want to like: Mark Kozelek-related enterprises who sung about their troubled childhoods and why girls didn’t like them (until they were famous, and now girls like them, but it’s not authentic, you know . . .). I resisted most of the major music trends at the time: Pavement, Wilco, Radiohead . . . all of whom I now love. I associated them with esoterica and non-conformist conformism. I went on a trip with two of my best friends, Joey and James, and was forced to watch MEETING PEOPLE IS EASY over and over again, and thought Thom Yorke and his gang were depressive, pretentious louts.

In 1998 . . . I don’t know. I listened to the Talking Heads a lot; I was really interested in what Weezer was doing. I discovered Bob Dylan a year earlier and affirmed my fanship for Springsteen. I listened to Dylan’s GREATEST HITS VOLUME 3 (and, to a lesser extent, THE BIG LEBOWSKI soundtrack) over and over again. The tape would flip in my car and I would listen to it again. I really wasn’t interested in a guy who opened his albums by declaring that he was “The King of Carrot Flowers.”

And it’s all so stunningly and boringly ironic because now I’m writing a Masters paper on NMH. After repeated listens, I’m convinced IN THE AEROPLANE OVER THE SEA is perhaps the greatest album ever made. I’ve come to discover the lose thematic narrative that Jeff Mangum and his fellow Neutrals constructed about loss, innocence, domestic dispute, failed relationships, and (of course) Anne Frank. That’s what my paper is about in a nutshell – how the Anne Frank metaphor explains nothing but reveals everything. His obsession with her dual tragic irony and childlike innocence is what makes her “the only girl I ever loved.” He turns middle school required reading into something of mythic import, an arch-narrative that informs his own tragic existence and similarly ill-defined desire for transcendence.

I point this out because it’s so rare that an album can do this. Granted, I’ve been butt-kicked before by albums – Nick Drake’s BRYTER LAYTER, Velvet Underground’s S/T, and more recently Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s SOME LOUD THUNDER. But, to me, AEROPLANE is the MOBY-DICK of albums; it’s epic, in a way, and I’d only say something like that about an album.

As a writer, I’m interested in the weirdly cohesive, yet incoherent, mythic narrative that Mangum paints: First he is the King of Carrot Flowers, then he wants to befriend a Two Headed Boy, then he’s pining for Anne Frank, followed by a vision of a Communist Daughter that both Freud and Marx would have a field day with, then he’s singing about a carnival freak show, then he’s singing about ghosts, and finally the Two Headed Boy again (which, in full dualism mode, is him.) In between, he finds room for ambiguous references to Jesus and the aforementioned doomed Dutch diarist.

Unlike a lot of indie rock (but like a lot too, I guess), there’s no room for irony. I used to love The Decemberists, but now I’m finding them a bit too precocious. I firmly believe that Colin Meloy believes he was “born for the stage.” Yet the more I think about it, his “Mariner’s Revenge Song” and “Crane Wife” are like overlong creative writing projects. They’re wildly ambitious and yet too neat; pastiches of pastiches of pastiches . . . eventually that precocious seventh grader should get tired of making civil-war dioramas, but not Colin. And yet, I suppose this is why I kind of loved them in the first place.

But AEROPLANE resists my criticisms even in its sloppiness, precociousness, repetitions, excessive use of the theremin, and desire to remain uninterpreted.

In my favorite song, HOLLAND, 1945, Mangum sings

“But now we must pack up every piece
Of the life we used to love
Just to keep ourselves
At least enough to carry on”

I think this is the emotional centerpiece of the album. It ties in with a central theme of my own life, the perhaps wrong-headed idea that I often reiterate, that “Well, maybe things are rough now, but it would probably be worse in early 1990s Rwanda. So get over it.”

Or maybe I’m wildly misinterpreting it. But I can’t wait to write about it. And I hope you listen to it.

| By Andytown | 10:12 PM

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Posted by: bethan at November 16, 2007 03:00 PM

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