How Strange it is to Be Anything At All: The Essay Turned Album Review I Went Crazy Trying to Write

Like the object you constantly encounter until you need it and then it’s nowhere to be found, I thought that by this point in my life I would capable of intelligibly articulating why it is that I find certain things appealing—why I prefer David Attenborough’s narration to Planet Earth over Sigourney Weaver’s, why I think that everything looks better when it’s covered in wood grain shelf liner. But the moment I attach pen to paper—or more accurately, fingertip to keyboard—explanations that were once so clear in my head evaporate until they are little more than shadows of words with missing letters and muffled meanings returning only after they are no longer needed. This is exactly how I feel about Neutral Milk Hotel’s magnum opus, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. It exists in my consciousness as a complete artifact, cross-filed among memories of high school and long car rides. It is only when I try to actively recall it do I realize that it’s incomplete. Words and notes that were so clear in my head become impossible to decipher and I’m left dumbfounded unable to offer anything other than, “there’s just something about it—his voice, its simplicity—I can’t explain it.” And maybe that’s why it achieved the cult success that it did: the only explanation that can be offered is the album itself. When I told a few friends that I would be writing about Aeroplane they agreed with my assessment that its attraction is indefinable and yet, it did not occur to me that trying to write about Mangum’s ability to transcend language may in itself be a more difficult task than I had originally planned. How exactly can one write about the incompleteness of words without lacking in their own words? Rather than try to offer an explanation as to how Aeroplane is able to evoke such a visceral response or even what it’s about, the most I can hope to impart is my own experience in trying to undertake such an endeavor.

I lost track of the hours I spent listening to Aeroplane in the dark trying to find something that wasn’t there. Hoping that maybe this time it would make sense, that I would discover the prophetic significance of “God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life.” Angels never descended from Heaven and I would like to hope that at some point my friends became concerned about my well-being. Doing dishes and sleeping became secondary to sitting on the couch in my pajamas trying to figure what a wandering genie was, as though being able to identify what type of sound it produced was on par with finding the Holy Grail. (Incidentally, it’s a type of organ made by Lowrey.) At some point amid the mess around me, I came to the realization that writing about a pop record—no matter how awe-inspiring—should not be a maddening experience. I can’t tell you what Mangum is singing about, and I’m not sure that I would want to even if I could. I think that on a very basic level Aeroplane is about the relationship between personal and collective history. Just as Mangum is trying to reconcile with the death of Anne Frank—one of the album’s predominant figures—through his own experiences, I can only understand these songs through myself. It has such personal significance for listeners that to try to turn it to an objective narrative would be a distraction from what may be read about this piece of music: our perspective is shaped by everything that we have done, or seen, or read. We are less detached from history than we may imagine. Though I rarely think about the conquests of Charlemagne as I brush my teeth, so much of my knowledge of the past—conscious or not—informs my decisions and opinions.

Amid the scores of flowery reviews I have read (a recent search on Google with the words “aeroplane over the sea review” yielded about 67,000 results) some have written that it took multiple listens before they were able to discern it, others have freely admitted that it brought them to tears, one in particular notes its impact: “For the ways the album has influenced so many people, I wish more would take this away from it—that it's OK to examine, and be nakedly emotional, about stuff aside from the lint in your belly button." Despite this ‘call for emotion’ these reviews, and perhaps even reviews written of anything, lack a sincerity that just can’t quite be translated. I am not doubting the emotional authenticity of tears shed over the album, and I am not above admitting my own guilt to having done so. The failure of these reviews reflects the failure of language; it’s like trying to describe “purple.” When I hear it I don’t think, “wow, this is ethereal,” but something that sounds more like the indiscernible mumblings of Charlie Brown’s teacher. While Roland Barthes may not have had a concept album about Anne Frank in mind, it remains just as relevant that he wrote in A Lover’s Discourse, “the more I experience the specialty of my desire, the less I can give it a name; to the precision of the target corresponds a wavering of the name; what is characteristic of desire, proper to desire, can produce only an impropriety of the utterance.” Perhaps the reason Aeroplane has generated so many reviews and responses, my own included, is in part due to the fact that the album arouses a desire to do so, or rather a desire to be a part of it. We can hear its beckoning call of singing saws and flugelhorns drawing us closer and right before we can make the leap, as Mangum sings in “Communist Daughter,” “the bridges burst and twist around” sending us back to reality. By writing about it we can take a little piece of it back with us. When I was in third grade I remember being so awestruck by the movie Now and Then that the only way that I could deal with it was to spend several months worth of recess writing myself into a sequel. What had become an epic sixty page screenplay written on wide ruled notebook paper unfortunately never made it to the big screen, but it let me feel like I had become a part of that world.

What I can best describe as a collage of everything that has ever come before it, Aeroplane creates a world that exists outside of time where zanzithiphones and Uilleann pipes fill the air with uncanny melodies. The ghost of Anne Frank floats about but she never really died, as Mangum sings, “now she’s a little boy in Spain/ Playing pianos filled with flames.” Though she is regarded as the glue that binds Aeroplane together, it is much more about his own response to her diary than an historically accurate account of her life. Around the time I was first getting into Neutral Milk Hotel I was coming out of a big They Might Be Giants kick. I was charmed by their quirky lyrics and unorthodox subjects. I was at an age where the cleverness of “Birdhouse In Your Soul” and “Doctor Worm” really struck me and I loved the idea that you could write a song about that kind of stuff and it was okay. At first I think I saw Aeroplane in a similar way; “it’s so weird and cool that this guy is singing about how much he loves Anne Frank!” Without delving too deep into what I’m sure has been the basis of countless theses and dissertations, this brings up a relevant point about the cultural significance of Anne Frank and the division between her as a person and her as a commodity.

Of the millions upon millions of people killed during the Holocaust, Anne Frank’s is the only name I can recall. I imagine that it is the only name most people can recall. When I was in middle school a boy in the next grade that I didn’t know very well suddenly passed away. I don’t think I ever thought twice about him during our exceedingly rare and brief encounters. I don’t even think he knew my name. But for weeks after he died he was the only thing my friends and I would talk about. Suddenly he had become a meaningful part of our lives as though he had always been a friend. As callous as this may seem, we were only interested in him because he was dead. I had seen Casper enough to know that ghosts make the best friends. But why? What fuels this morbid attraction? Maybe my friends and I were curious, maybe it forced us to confront our own mortality in a way we didn’t really understand, maybe we just wanted to be pitied. Had Anne Frank survived the war it's doubtful she would have become the cherished emblem of unbridled optimism and courage. It would make her too real, too complete. Trapped in eternal youth, she has become the quintessential dead friend.

Her diary is so intimate, so familiar, so inviting. It’s not hard to identify with her, separating her legacy from the life she actually lead. Perhaps she has become the voice of the Holocaust precisely because that is not what her story is about. It’s bereft of the insufferable torment displayed by the innumerable survivor accounts. The curtain closes before she is stripped of her dignity to die in the most monstrous and inhuman way possible. It’s so easy to ignore the fear she must have felt when the annex was discovered. Or that upon arriving to Auschwitz she was forced to stand naked in a huddled mass while she was tattooed and the beautiful hair that graces her iconic photograph was shaved off. In her essay “Who Owns Anne Frank?” Cynthia Ozick wrote, “In celebrating Anne Frank’s years in the secret annex, the nature and meaning of her death has been, in effect, forestalled. The diary’s keen lens is hopelessly opaque to the diarist’s explicit doom—and this opacity, replicated in young readers in particular, has lead to shamelessness." Subsequently, she is best remembered for the words she wrote on July 15, 1944: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” Words that have been applied to everything from the corruption of Wal-Mart to dating advice—it seems so obvious that getting over a bad girlfriend can be so easily compared to a teenage girl who spent over two years in an attic with seven other people subsisting on boiled lettuce to avoid being murdered because of their religious affiliation. I’m not sure what’s worse: the way that she died or the fact that it has become trivialized to the extent that her capture is referenced as a joke on Family Guy alongside quips about Coach and Hollywood Squares. Ozick points out that since the diary’s publication it “has been bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced; it has been infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized, falsified, kitchified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied.” I suppose that if the moon can be claimed, so too can Anne Frank.

In getting back to Aeroplane, I retract what I might have thought about it years ago. I’m not sure what Cynthia Ozick would say about the album, as she wrote that “almost every hand that has approached the diary with well meaning intention of publicizing it has contributed to the subversion of history," but I don’t think that in any of its almost forty minutes Mangum ever once lays claim to Anne Frank. Though she may appear in impossible places—“and one day in New York City baby/ A girl fell from the sky”—he never sees her as something she is not, he never glorifies her. In an interview shortly before the album’s release in 1998 he spoke of the impact her diary had upon him:

You love people because you know their story. You have sympathy for people even when they do stupid things because you know where they're coming from, you understand where they're at in their head. And so here I am as deep as you can go in someone's head, in some ways deeper than you can go with even someone you know in the flesh. And then at the end, she gets disposed of like a piece of trash. And that was something that completely blew my mind… And I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine and somehow I'd have the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank.

Yet, she is never an object of pity. One of Mangum’s greatest talents as a songwriter is
his ability to create songs that overflow with grief without being emotionally exploitative. They border on absurdism, mimicking the human condition in an unsettlingly real way while defying the physical and social constructs of our own world. I’m reminded of Eugène Ionesco’s The Chairs, in which an elderly couple prepare for invisible guests who are arriving to hear an orator deliver what the old man has discovered is the meaning of life. Believing that their message will be heard and that they can die happy the couple throw themselves out of a window into the ocean. Though as the orator begins to speak it becomes evident that he is a deaf mute, reciting nonsense and scribbling unintelligible symbols on a chalkboard. As with Aeroplane, there is a question as to whether it’s genius or madness. There’s something about Mangum’s voice as he sings “I will shout until they know what I mean/ I mean the marriage of a dead dog sing/ And a synthetic flying machine” that suggests that there is something to be read beyond the union of a dead dog and a synthetic flying machine. And quite likely, there is. Before Neutral Milk Hotel, Mangum played in a band called Synthetic Flying Machine when he first recorded a version of what would become the second half of Aeroplane’s second track, “The King of Carrot Flowers parts 2-3,” the song in which the lyrics mentioned above appear. So much of the album is based on his own personal experiences and memories, as he notes in an interview, “A lot of times, each lyric, each line is sort of a moment in my life and somehow they get crammed together into a song that makes sense to me… So many of the words are little filmstrips that are rolling through my head.”

To try to describe Aeroplane as a sequential narrative is simply not possible—tenses shift, point of view changes. It’s never explicitly clear what’s happening or to whom. A two-headed boy stuck in a formaldehyde jar and Siamese twins lost and dying in a forest are caught in Aeroplane’s exhaust, calling forth crumbling sepia photographs of Depression era circuses and freak shows interlaced with Nazi occupied Holland. And yet, it maintains an effortless fluidity guided by an overwhelming sense of loss. The title track celebrates life and love but acknowledges that “one day we will die and our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea.” There is little distinction between life and death, everything is bound by an unearthly give and take where things work themselves out. Stranded in the woods and facing death, one of the Siamese twins tells her sister: “We will fold and freeze together/ Far away from here/ There is sun and spring and green forever/ But now we move to feel/ For ourselves inside some strangers stomach.” They’re going to die, but it will all right because whatever happens they will still be together. Mangum addresses the album’s theme of “endless endless” in the liner notes suggesting the interconnectivity that pulses through his words and music alike. Just as songs bleed into one another themes and characters reoccur throughout. Mangum acknowledged this in an interview saying, “everything is reliant on everything else to exist, and everyone is a part of that." It doesn’t matter what a wandering genie is or what he’s trying to convey as he sings two verses of “I love you Jesus Christ/ Jesus Christ I love you/ Yes I do.” What is gained, or at least what I gained after over a month of looking for clues in old interviews and demos, had much more to do with my own understanding of how I read the world. I didn’t have a life changing epiphany and I don’t think that the album affected my attitude anymore than anything else that I have been exposed to and enjoyed, and I think that that’s the point. It stresses the significance of everything.