One of my formative experiences as a music fan happened on an otherwise unremarkable afternoon at the Camp Airy photo shack in the summer of 2001. The Camp’s photo master was a notorious indie rock geek, the kind who was listening to Animal Collective back when scenesters knew them as Baltimore’s best kept secret. I was fishing a print out of the photo fixer when the opening chords of Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Oh Comely” rattled from the disk changer on the front porch. The next eight minutes passed in a dumbstruck blur, and within a few years, the band’s brief yet inexhaustible oeuvre had become a personal obsession.
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel’s 1998 album on which “Oh Comely” appeared, is an arresting moodkiller, and it’s anything but a casual, background listen. In that sense, it brings to mind Vladimir Nabokov’s views on reading “spinally”— on experiencing great art through pure feeling, since pure feeling is something that only great art can produce.
But Aeroplane deserves more than whatever limited scrutiny a purely emotional, spinal reading could provide. Something so labyrinthine and emotionally fraught begs to be both understood and felt. If only felt, Aeroplane stands as one of music’s most gut-wrenching accomplishments. If understood, it suddenly becomes a singular cultural product of the late 1990s: a reflection on atrocity in a time when atrocity was far from people’s minds, and a stunning artistic commemoration of the Holocaust produced by a non-Jew.
***
Ten years after its release on indie juggernaut Merge Records, Aeroplane is an undisputed modern classic. In 2003, Magnet magazine called it the greatest album of the past ten years. Blender recently named it the 32nd greatest indie rock album of all time, ahead of comparatively mainstream fare like the Shins’ Oh Inverted World and The Strokes’ Is This It. It cracked Spin magazine’s 2005 list of the top 100 records of the past 20 years. And perhaps most importantly, the trendsetting online music magazine Pitchfork— which has as much of a claim on the “voice of a generation” tag as any other publication today—named Aeroplane the second greatest album of the ‘90s. Pitchfork also awarded a 2005 reissue of Aeroplane a perfect score in its notorious ratings system, an honor given to only 39 other albums ever.
But Aeroplane is not a typical ‘90s record, and one wonders why it came about when it did. Much of Aeroplane significance stems from its emergence during an era columnist Charles Krauthammer has aptly called America’s “holiday from history,” and from the fact that an album so perfectly tailored to post-9/11 anxieties could be produced during the middle of the Clinton years. Aeroplane seems even less explicable when measured against the rest of the late— ‘90s musical canon. During the historical intermission between the fall of the Soviet Union and the fall of the World Trade Center, the music scene was dominated by narcissistic Brit pop (Oasis, Blur), rave music (Portishead, Moby, Prodigy) and American slacker rock (Pavement), and by prog-rockers like Radiohead and the Flaming Lips and sonic innovators like DJ Shadow and Aphex Twin. But it was a time best characterized probably by Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up,” a controversial synth groove that critiqued the decadence of the late ‘90s underground, while its infectiousness dared its listeners not to participate.
Appropriately, the ‘90s are now seen as an era of moral complacency rather than of international calm—Qaeda pulled off scattered but spectacular terrorist attacks, Islamic militants slaughtered Algerian villagers by the hundreds, and the protracted Congolese civil war killed more people than any conflict since World War II. But few politicians and even fewer entertainers were paying attention. Accordingly, the late ‘90s were not a time when musicians generally asked big, challenging questions.
Aeroplane’s release in 1998 makes the achievement of Neutral Milk Hotel—and, more specifically, of Jeff Mangum, the band’s lead singer and driving force—all the more astounding. Radiohead’s OK Computer—without a doubt the era’s defining record—was a reaction to turn-of-the-century decadence and an anticipation of the bleak emotional landscape wrought by the tech boom. But Aeroplane, which didn’t give voice to any of the unique dilemmas or concerns of the late ‘90s, seems like it came out of nowhere—or, out of a single artist’s personal reckoning with an incomprehensible part of human history.
Mangum’s vision represents the triumph of a determined and neurotic artist over the vapidity of his historical circumstances. While most people were on a holiday from history, Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum was not. He was tortured by it.
***
Mangum’s unusual and complicated relationship with the past is less surprising in light of his early demos and home recordings, many of which are interested in preserving some personal or historical past.
In Aeroplane, the past is felt on a fundamental level, as Mangum employs antiquated musical techniques like toy instruments and traditional Balkan-style riffs. Meanwhile, the acoustic portions are stark, seemingly critiquing rather than celebrating mid–‘60s Dylan-style folk—touches which make the album experimental and self-consciously anachronistic. Aeroplane has a sound best described as a negotiation between late 19th century kitsch, ‘60s folk revival, and late-‘60s psychedelia, with a seamlessness that gives it a decidedly fresh feel.
Mangum’s early musical development was marked throughout by a fascination with the past and a corresponding desire to give it some experimental or novel spin. As Kim Cooper explains in her book about In The Aeroplane Over the Sea, Mangum’s early years as a musician were marked by an isolation from, and later a conscious aversion to, the cultural mainstream to which most independent artists react. According to Cooper, Mangum’s musical interests were unusual from the outset. Mangum and his creative clique—which would later become the Elephant 6 Collective, a loose affiliation of bands including Neutral Milk Hotel, Apples in Stereo and Of Montreal—listened mostly to “weird old Folkways ethnographic records, free jazz on Impulse, [and] electronic music.” By the time he was in his late teens, Mangum was an obsessive home-recorder and a “quarter-bin record raccoon.” He came into his own through a subcultural, do-it-yourself attitude and through the sound experimentation that would typify Elephant 6. Yet the source of Mangum’s later fascination with the Holocaust is not immediately obvious, although Mangum gave some hints during a 2002 interview with Pitchfork (his last). Asked about his continued work with sound collages and tape loops, he answered: “I love the idea of a record containing an entire universe, where the sounds span decades of recording from all over the world and all sorts of different sources.” The sound collage reduces history to an atonal hum, stripping disparate cultural elements of their particularity— and then smashing them into each other. But the collage also preserves, especially the seemingly random: alarm clocks, political speeches, bargain-bin records, and train whistles are patched into a coherent, crypto-musical roar.
Mangum eventually gave those dissonant, historical echoes a more coherent voice. Aside from his home-recorded tape loops, most of Mangum’s early demos were stream-of-consciousness reformulations of the problems that stalk most young adults: friendships, relationships, and the darker regions of the late adolescent psyche. But there are also songs that suggest a certain progression in his thinking—songs like “Ferris Wheel on Fire,” which seems like it could be based upon an actual event. And even if it is not, the song weaves together fragments of memory and experience in a way that echoes the disquieting, abstract sound collage.
Mangum sings,
Now I’m keeping stow
In someone’s bright carnival ride
All the crowd just cheers
As the bolts break and metal collides
Spiraling through
And flying up all over the hills
And now everything’s broken in two
And everything’s way over.
“Ferris Wheel on Fire” is a pre-Aeroplane composition that didn’t make it on to either of Neutral Milk Hotel’s full-length albums. But it introduces Aeroplane’s interest in forcing some catastrophe upon listeners, and Mangum places listeners in the middle it, making them think or feel their way through it even though the music serves as their only frame of reference. In “Ferris Wheel,” Mangum narrates as his emotional naïité is swept away by a world of senseless tragedy, and as the catastrophe becomes intertwined with the very innocence it disallows. The “bright carnival ride” is a vestige of uncomplicated youth turned into a smoldering symbol of the chaos and complication of the adult world.
But there’s more to it than that. In lines that could have been written about 9/11, Mangum sings,
But now most of all
I am holding you under my skin
Watch these buildings fall
Watch as each weak resistance caves in
All over you all over
And now finally fading from view
Is everything we ever knew
The narrative goes from a Ferris wheel on fire to two late-adolescent lovers clutching each other as their world is spectacularly destroyed. Perhaps the line about “weak resistance” equates the catastrophe to the crossing of certain sexual or emotional boundaries, or maybe the prospect of great personal upheaval is playing itself out in a figurative, personal apocalypse. Either way, to be young and exposed to the world’s traumatizing realities is catastrophic in its own right—in Aeroplane, Mangum takes this a step further and narrates the loss of everyone’s naïvité.
Because in Aeroplane, the Catastrophe is the Holocaust.
***
Neutral Milk Hotel bandmembers (from left) Scott Spillane, lead singer Jeff Mangum, Julian Koster, and Jeremy Barnes.
In a post-Pol Pot, post-Rwanda world, the idea that humanity has learned nothing from the Holocaust is a cultural cliché, and few modern thinkers have mapped society’s lingering holocaustal tendencies as thoroughly as literary critic Theodor Adorno. For Adorno, post-war society unwittingly possessed the same latent, genocidal mindset that allowed the Holocaust to occur in the first place. Adorno wondered whether poetry could still serve a humanistic purpose in such societies or whether society was capable of putting art to anything other than the most perverse uses. His most famous statement is that “poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
To Adorno, this dilemma played itself out through Holocaust commemoration, as he believed that an overly-philosophical or theoretical reading of history gravely distances us from historical events themselves. It was in this spirit that he concluded, “all post-Auschwitz culture, including its critique, is garbage.” In essence, Adorno worried that the more we try to represent atrocity, the more abstract and distant the atrocity becomes, even to the point that it becomes buried under the weight of critical or theoretical discourse.
Adorno seemed prophetic as the ‘90s dragged on. Holocaust representation reached a crisis point of sorts with Roberto Benigni’s movie Life is Beautiful, in which the Holocaust is employed as gothic comedy and the genocidal essence of the event is noticeably downplayed. This crisis was exacerbated by Norman Finkelstein’s book The Holocaust Industry, in which he called for less analysis of how we remember the Holocaust and more analysis of why we remember. Finkelstein’s explanation: Israel, Jewish power, Holocaust profiteers, American foreign policy, and the Cold War.
So by the late ‘90s, criticism was making numerous demands on Holocaust representation, especially with the rise of postmodern scholarship willing to examine the socio-economic and socio-historical dimensions of Holocaust remembrance. Yet the popularity of Life is Beautiful proved that the public was making no demands at all. And even after 9/11, a sanitized depiction of genocide like Hotel Rwanda could play to critical acclaim.
Enter Jeff Mangum, who picked up The Diary of Anne Frank in his mid-20s and was so devastated by it that it would dominate his creative life during his final years in the musical spotlight.
The unifying thread and distinguishing feature of Aeroplane is its Holocaust narrative. It also distinguishes Aeroplane from just about every other record to come out of the West’s holiday from history. And it gives the album urgent contemporary relevance.
Mangum screams and whispers his way through Aeroplane, with deep, personal torment dripping off of every verse. It’s a powerfully effective work of commemoration, reducing everything else to stunned silence, and begging you to pay attention.
***
The first track on Aeroplane is “King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 1,” which opens with the following lines:
When you were young you were the king of carrot flowers,
And how you build the tower tumbling through the trees,
In holy rattlesnakes that fell all around your feet.
The “when you were young” reverses typical storytelling convention: “when I was young” or “when we were young” are time-honored tropes, but “when you were young” suggests that the listener needs to be reminded of something. According to Kim Cooper, though Anne Frank doesn’t enter the album until the title track some songs later, “Carrot Flowers” sets the agenda—this album is about memory and its lurking dangers, about the things we would rather forget but are forced by moral necessity to confront head-on. In “Carrot Flowers” the confrontation begins: the family unit disintegrates as “we would lay and learn what each other’s bodies are for,” another instance in which juvenile psycho-sexual torment goes hand-in-hand with the darkness of the external world. It’s cynical stuff, but even here there’s a sliver of hope. Melancholy yet upbeat, the song insists that there is something intrinsic to be gained from this deep, painful reckoning with ourselves: Let’s go back to “when you were young,” it says, and pull the Catastrophe out of the mental darkness.
This is a notable moment of conflation, as that catastrophe could also refer to the kind of personal confusion and pain evoked in songs like “Ferris Wheel on Fire.” Critics have combed Aeroplane for autobiographical references, but few have looked at how Mangum’s checkered relationship with his own past drives the album’s Holocaust narrative forward
It begins in earnest two songs later, with the title track. It’s a peculiar song—a lo-fi masterpiece played over ominous, disorienting background noise. It’s as comfortingly twee as anything brainy indie rockers like The Decembrists ever wrote, but far darker than anything else we’re used to hearing. There’s calm on the surface and menace down below: Mangum begins by singing about idyllic love, and abruptly shifts to a meditation on Holocaust remembrance itself.
Of the song’s numerous points of complication, none is as important as this one:
What a curious life we have found here tonight
There is music that sounds from the street there
There are lights in the clouds
Anna’s ghost all around
Hear her voice as it’s
Rolling and ringing through me.
This is simultaneously the most optimistic and the most pessimistic song on the album. It suggests that memory can do justice to a figure frozen in our mind as the perpetual victim—that the murdered can speak, and that Anne Frank can, in her own words, “go on living after I’m dead.” This belief in the power of memory pervades Aeroplane, and Mangum opens a later track called “Ghost” by addressing Anne directly:
Ghost, ghost I know you live within me,
feel you as you fly.
Who, or what, are the monsters? Aeroplane raises the question, but it doesn’t give us any easy answers. Neither does the Holocaust: in a speech to the German Bundestag on January 28, 1998 (just two weeks before Aeroplane’s release), former Yad Vashem director Yehuda Bauer condemned “the idea that we ourselves are not devils because we are not Nazis” as “pure escapism,” and went on to say that “under certain circumstances, we might have become either Eichmanns or rescuers.” This echoes Hannah Arendt’s argument in Eichmann in Jerusalem regarding the “banality of evil,” which posited that the Nazis were an extreme manifestation of human tendencies rather than an outright deviation from them.
By this reasoning, human nature explains the Holocaust, and so the monsters are everywhere. Aeroplane has its villains, but they aren’t the Nazi exterminators who sent Anne Frank and her family to their deaths. We get a sense of who they are in “Oh Comely,” a song with stark opening chords which bring to mind a mid-‘60s masterpiece of Holocaust commemoration: the acoustic alternative take of Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row.” It’s a powerful popular treatment of the Holocaust, and a chilling point of comparison for reasons other than the songs’ similar chord progressions.
“Desolation Row” is a penetrating look at the societies that allow Holocausts to happen, but Dylan’s speaker is too jaded and morally paralyzed to do anything about it. He sings about “Dr. Filth” and his “heart-attack machine,” and Dylan’s reference to “the nurse, some local loser” being “in charge of the cyanide hole” is pure Hannah Arendt. But when it comes to getting inside the event itself, Dylan’s speaker is lacking—he’s elegiac, but purely reportorial. For him, human nature is beyond saving, and the song ends with a plea for complete moral isolation:
Right now I can’t read too good
Don’t send me no more letters no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row.
By contrast, “Oh Comely” deals with the problem of living in a world where the monsters are everywhere. So in Aeroplane’s most arresting moment of philosophical clarity, Mangum accepts the challenges of living in a world where holocausts are possible:
And I know they buried her body with others
Her sister and mother and 500 families
And will she remember me 50 years later
I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine
Know all your enemies
We know who our enemies are.
The music falls silent as Mangum whispers the last two lines. They serve as the album’s climax, and fittingly, they deal with the problem of locating abstract evil in reference to the apparently senseless murder of Anne Frank. For Mangum, the message of the Holocaust is that though we have no idea who our enemies are, ignorance doesn’t exculpate us, as it does Dylan’s defeated narrator. While “Desolation Row” is hardly an argument for moral resignation, it contains no moment like this one, and nothing that could be mistaken as morally empowering. Dylan’s dispassionate resignation stands in stark contrast to Mangum’s passionate though uncertain engagement with present-day terrors.
Mangum’s existential confusion similarly references a world wracked by fundamental moral ambiguity. Throughout it all, the only certainty is that humanity has backed itself into a suicidal corner. In a sense, Mangum is presenting holocausts as a kind of universal human condition.
Then, in the song’s chorus— one of the few found on this largely asymmetrical album—he sings:
But now we must pick up every piece
Of the life we used to love
Just to keep ourselves
At least enough to carry on.
It’s unclear whether he’s speaking from the perspective of Anne Frank’s family or from the perspective of an autonomous moral actor whose sense of certainty has been shattered by the very possibility of Anne Franks and Holocausts. It’s conceivable that he’s only referring to the Frank family’s decision to go into hiding, but in context the reference is just vague enough to bring both historical and contemporary circumstances to mind. This kind of connection represents the opposite of the quietism espoused at the end of Dylan’s “Desolation Row:” even in Mangum’s world of perfect moral ambiguity— a world of collapsing buildings, of Ferris wheels on fire, of feelings we can’t understand, and of inexplicable mind-blowing atrocity—none of us is free of moral responsibility. Horrible as the world is, we have to “keep ourselves/at least enough to carry on.”
Mangum drives his point home in the album’s final song, the searing “Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2.” It’s a difficult listen, if only for its penultimate lines:
And when we break we’ll wait for our miracle
God is a place where some holy spectacle lies
And when we break we’ll wait for our miracle
God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life.
In “Ghost” and “Holland 1945,” Mangum tells the story of Anne Frank with heartrending emotional urgency. In “Oh, Comely&rdquol and “Two Headed Boy Pt. 2,” we find out why: it’s not the world that’s beyond saving, as in “Desolation Row.” Rather, it’s our collective sense of certainty, since our Gods, our moral certitude, and our sense of security are in jeopardy.
But Aeroplane doesn’t wallow in pessimism. The Anne Frank of Aeroplane might teeter on the brink of destruction, but Mangum constantly forbids us to give up on her. In that sense she’s symbolic of a human race wrestling with its own awesome propensity for evil—of an anguished moral conscience refusing to ignore, or to forget, its dark side. For Mangum, that dark side was as real in 1998 as it was in 1945. Like it or not, the Catastrophe is our own—and ours to respond to.
***
Aeroplane is an attempt at confronting the Catastrophe, as well as a chronicle of one particular confrontation. Thus it works brilliantly as an album about Jeff Mangum and the Holocaust. It works less well when the two are separated. In Mangum’s universe, there’s little qualitative difference between the Holocaust and the personal crises evoked in Neutral Milk Hotel’s earlier work, and there’s nothing to suggest that the Holocaust is anything but a more extreme “Ferris wheel on fire.” Mangum is best at squeezing meaning out of found feelings and memories, but his masterpiece sometimes reflects the shortcomings of this approach—if anything, it makes the Holocaust too comprehensible, and Mangum’s relativistic moral universe is subsequently limited enough to fit into a 40-minute album. Nowhere is it suggested that Anne Frank was murdered only because of her Judaism. And nowhere is it suggested that her murderers existed within a particular historical context that gave rise to a uniquely insidious and destructive kind of evil.
For all of its philosophical depth, Aeroplane often seems like a simplistic gut reaction to an incredibly complicated historical figure. (According to Cooper, that’s essentially what the album was.) The impression of oversimplification is not helped by the medium, which may trivialize its subject matter entirely. It is legitimate to ask whether indie rock should be handling the Holocaust at all, and whether a scenester’s night out should include slam dancing to a song about Anne Frank. The debate about the formal constraints of rock music is far from over.
Yet these criticisms speak to the album’s enduring power, and it is to Mangum’s great credit that his record even invites this kind of a reassessment. Mangum would turn out to be one of the most important figures in recent independent music, giving rise to anti-folk and Eastern European revivalism and influencing indie titans like The Decembrists and Arcade Fire. But Aeroplane would prove so consuming that it all but ended Mangum’s musical career. Despite the recognition that Aeroplane received and the release in 2001 of a critically-lauded album of field recordings he made at a Bulgarian music festival, Mangum has not released a substantial work since Aeroplane. His gradually growing fan base still anxiously waits for him to come out of his self-imposed exile.
I had always hoped that the tenth anniversary of Aeroplane would see Neutral Milk Hotel play a one-off reunion in New York—maybe at Town Hall or the Beacon Theatre, and maybe on the same bill as one of their better-known musical descendants. But it’s not going to happen. Adorno said that poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Maybe Mangum learned first-hand.
ARMIN ROSEN is a sophomore List College. He has previously written for The Current about Turkmenistan and Darfur.