Let me begin with a caveat, Neutral Milk Hotel's second full-length album, In the Aeroplane over the Sea, embodies nearly every aesthetic I've grown disappointed in with American pop music – the self-absorbed, first-person narrator who often speaks in stock sentimentalities about adolescent love, an unblinking nostalgia for antiquity, and a bald-faced Romanticism and mythos on par with worst Coleridge lyric. The very thought that Jeff Mangum says he wrote the entire album in some fitful wake from the nightmares he encountered after having read a copy of Anne Frank's, The Diary of a Young Girl, makes me want to roll my eyes so far back they could see out my asshole, and yet…
And yet, ten years after its initial release, Aeroplane, is consistently at the top of my "recently played" I-tunes list. Why? Because the album, not in spite of the above-mentioned flaws but because of them, questions the very reasons for which I have erected aesthetic scaffolds in the first place. In the Aeroplane may be personal, but it is no biography. This is a free-associative romp of images, shards really, of historical imagination, on par with the best sections of Andre Breton's Nadja – a fractured dream that sounds eerily like what Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Ulysses, called the nightmare of history. In short, Mangum is encountering past the way a child encounters the present – leaping from parents impaling each other with cutlery to the sacramental handling of rattlesnakes without even batting an eye. Thus there is no need for editorial restraint because everything, even the clichéd romantic gestures, is shrouded in strangeness.
In one sense this strangeness is achieved lyrically through Mangum's attention to the physicality of memory when he addresses his imaginary Frank saying, "now how I remember you/ how I would push my fingers through your mouth/ to make those muscles move." Later he places himself in the shoes of both her adolescent love and his own adolescence, ignoring overt descriptions of sex that come with previous experience and bookishness, and instead seeing sex in everything, where even "semen stains the mountaintops" and where the act in all its mystery becomes violent and risky, where gentle touch transforms into "fingers through the notches of your spine."
But that's just the beginning. The real inventiveness of the album is in the music, the presentation, which comes across something like Harry Smith's catalogue of homemade folk music history on an acid trip. Even though the album was recorded on somewhat of a shoestring budget (especially compared to something like Bruce Springsteen's homage to Pete Seeger, We Shall Overcome [2005]), Mangum has employed a wide range of folk instrumentation – banjos, bagpipes, accordions, army horns, and even singing saws – that could resonate with nearly every decade of 20th century folk music. There are shards of funeral marches, carnival parades, hoedowns, mid-sixties psychodelia, all set to Mangum's scowling voice that one reviewer, punning on a lyric from the title track, likened to "a dead dog howl" that just keeps barking more and more frantically.
And it keeps barking after all these ten years. Barking that history is an untamed beast. That fragmentation can be beautiful in its violence. That our person is the only defense we have against the ruthless systems of power and money that keep pounding down the metaphor of Anne Frank with the countless other voices into the mass graves of collateral damage. Maybe more of us could ask like Mangum, "will she remember me 50 years later/ I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine." His album might just be a good start.
