The second installment of Glorious Noise’s publication of Max Heath’s intense examination of the music and lyrics in Neutral Milk Hotel’s classic album, In the Aeroplane over the Sea. If you missed the first installment, read Pts. One and Two now.

Max Heath revised this article from a thesis originally written in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors in Music at Wesleyan University in April, 2007. Max currently resides in Middletown, CT where he is a graduate student in composition at Wesleyan. He also actively writes, performs, produces, and records with several bands. Visit him on MySpace.

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After the speaker

has elicited as much joy as possible from the beautiful day portrayed in the

album’s title track, the sun sets and the speaker’s state of mind becomes

correspondingly crepuscular, his thoughts drifting to darker and more

emotionally complex themes in the following “Two-Headed Boy”.  While the first

third of the album was characterized by nostalgia, contentment, and a hint of

mystery and darkness, the second third reprioritizes these themes, delving more

deeply into obscurity as the speaker tries to reconcile the beauty he has known

with the suffering he encounters.  “Two-Headed Boy” marks a pointed sonic shift

as well, consisting of a fairly raw recording of a passionate vocal performance

accompanied starkly by a lone acoustic guitar.  This and the other two songs

with this bare arrangement—both “Oh Comely” and “Two-Headed Boy Part 2″ consist

of only singly-tracked guitar and vocals, except for some sparse doubled vocals

and horns in the second half of the former—make up the album’s emotional core,

anchoring the thematic exploration in the rest of the songs.

“Two-Headed Boy”

perpetuates the key of G major established in “In the Aeroplane over the Sea,”

which persists throughout the middle third of the album, excluding the

following interlude, “The Fool.”  The preservation of harmonic space combined

with a complete shift in arrangement and emotion establishes the two songs at

different ends of a single continuity.  This gives further support to the idea

that “Two-Headed Boy” is the night that follows the day of the title track,

especially as Mangum sings: “The Sun it has passed / Now it’s blacker than

black.”  Like the title track, “Two-Headed Boy” consists of a few simple

chords—this time G major, B major, C major, and D major.  The oscillating key

change between G major and B major during the verses is salient since up to

this point each song has remained firmly in one key.  While it remains

consonant, this fluctuation is still enough to hint at the duality that the

song’s symbolic protagonist embodies.

The dynamics of the

song are consistently loud until the gentle final verse.  The forceful guitar

attacks are muted throughout.  The lower fifths—or ‘power chords’—are

emphasized but they are filled out with higher thirds and octave doubles of the

roots and fifths on the downbeats of some measures and on chord changes.  All

strums, except for periodic flourishes at the end of some measures, are steady

eighth notes, and the speed and tension of the performance is reflected in the

lyrical imagery, both in the tapping sound the two-headed boy makes on his jar,

and in his dancing.

height="227" src="http://www.gloriousnoise.com/images/fig31Twoheadedboy.jpg" title="Vocal melody in verse one of 'Two-headed Boy'">

Fig 3.1: Vocal melody in verse one of “Two-headed Boy”

The vocal melody

follows the emotional content of the lyrics.  In the first half of each verse,

Mangum’s voice remains in its lower register as he calmly describes the

two-headed boy’s actions.  The heavily syncopated melody in this part is based

on three-note ascending scalar fragments (see fig. 3.1).  In the second half,

just before the refrain, his voice leaps up an octave as the speaker recognizes

the crucial emotional significance of those actions.  In the first verse, this

heightened passion corresponds to the speaker’s desire to determine the

location of the two-headed boy by the sound of his tapping on the jar.  In the

second verse, the speaker is overcome when he imagines how the boy interprets

sensation into emotion and joy in his dancing by “catching signals that sound

in the dark.”  In the third verse, his emotions boil over as he describes the

beauty of a magic radio the boy constructs and the dismayed reaction of the

boy’s lover:

And through the music he sweetly displays

Silver speakers that sparkle all day

Made for his lover who’s floating and choking with her hands across her face.

In the chorus, the melody outlines

a descending scale from D to G, leaping up to E and F#, then descending again. 

As the speaker notices the boy’s eyes are no longer moving, the vocals become

quiet and the melody forms an embellishment of the G-A-B fragment that begins

the verse.  At the final verse, the dynamics pull back slightly, the fierceness

of the guitar strumming softens, and the tone of Mangum’s voice becomes

tender.  Where he would normally leap up an octave, his soothing words are

transposed down an octave to establish an air of consolation.  He sings a

wordless lullaby as the tempo slows and the time signature changes to 3/4, a

reference to the time signature and sentimental tone of “Two-Headed Boy Part 2″

later in the album.  The tempo and time signature change also allows a seamless

transition into the following slower waltz, “The Fool.”

Lyrically, “Two-Headed

Boy” is one of the most opaque songs on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,

maybe second only to “Oh Comely”.  Its lyrical ambiguity is all the more

maddening because, as a whole, it is highly emotionally communicative.  This

quality is particularly emblematic of what Kevin Griffis (2003) describes as

Mangum’s capacity for

dada-esque poetry that manages to

convey an emotional texture, as if Mangum was working on a principle similar to

Ernest Hemingway’s theory of omission.

     Hemingway would

strip his works to the marrow, believing that the reader would intuitively

understand what had been omitted and that it would communicate more than the

words alone. The difference for Mangum was that he could use his voice as a

weapon to cut straight into your chest.

The passion of Mangum’s performance

combined with the large scale of the symbolism suggests a highly nuanced

meaning that lies intact only in the mind of the author.  Indeed, Mangum

claims, “There are only a couple of parts that seem to me to be pure

dream-sequence type stuff, but ninety-five percent of the album is either

experiences that I’ve had or experiences that friends have had, or historical

figures—it’s all real stuff” (Carioli, 1998).  “Two-Headed Boy” probably

contains a significant share of the five percent of fantasy-based content. 

Nevertheless, when understood in conjunction with the music and the example of

Anne Frank—certainly the ‘historical figure’ with the most dominating influence

on Aeroplane—the lyrics become more comprehensible.

Mangum says the basic

premise is that the boy “makes a magic radio for his girlfriend, but then she

breaks it.  It’s also about the end of the world, and he’s in a jar, and you

can’t really tell if he’s on display or real or not” (ibid).  Of course, the

two-headed boy is seemingly too dramatic a symbol not to have any outside

reference, and there is much evidence to confirm this.  In one sense, the

two-headed boy thrusts the dualistic undertones surrounding “King of Carrot

Flowers Part 1″ to the forefront.  As Mangum’s description above suggests,

there is also duality in how the boy is perceived— whether he is “real or

not.”  So who is this two-headed boy?  Is he simply a character through which

Mangum expresses the album’s themes, is he meant to symbolize a real person, or

both?  The diary of Anne Frank, Mangum’s principal exterior influence for the

album, offers significant insight into these questions.

In her diary, Anne

grapples with the idea of duality extensively, and it is one of the main

recurring themes in her entries.  She sees duality in how she perceives the

world outside herself, mainly through her love for two boys of the same name. 

At one point, she realizes, “Peter Schiff and Peter van Daan have melted into

one Peter, who’s good and kind and whom I long for desperately” (Frank, 1997,

p. 196).   But more importantly, Anne repeatedly sees herself as conflicted and

dualistic, and this is the subject of the remarkable final entry of her diary:

As I’ve told you many times, I’m split in two.  One

side contains my exuberant cheerfulness, my flippancy, my joy in life and,

above all, my ability to appreciate the lighter side of things…This side of me

is usually lying in wait to ambush the other one, which is much purer, deeper

and finer.  (Frank, 1997, pp. 330-331)

She goes on to describe a constant battle between her lighter side and

her more contemplative side for expression.  The two-headed boy is similarly

torn between expressing his joy and surrendering to somber contemplation,

dancing in one verse, building a magic radio to please his lover in another,

and lamenting his lack of fulfillment in the next.  It is certainly possible

that the two-headed boy represents Anne to some extent.  The word “boy”

certainly should not rule it out; gender seems to be a mutable characteristic

for Mangum, as evidenced by the sexual ambiguity of the characters in “King of

Carrot Flowers Part 1,” and his imagined reincarnation of Anne as a young

Spanish boy in the song, “Ghost,” later in the album.  Further, the two-headed

boy is trapped in a jar, and Anne shares a similar plight in her time in hiding

during the war.  She could look outside at the world around her, but was ever

conscious of the walls that bound her.  Like the two-headed boy, she expresses her

joy and creativity freely in spite of her confines, and even literally

practiced dancing regularly at times (Frank, 1997).  And as the two-headed boy

built a magic radio, she created a beautiful—perhaps magical, in Mangum’s

view—object: her diary.  Mangum’s choice to have the two-headed boy build a

radio may also reflect the importance of this device in Anne’s life; when she

was in hiding, the radio was crucial in that it was virtually her only means of

knowing about the outside world.  The song’s unsettling refrain seems to invoke

the suffering she endured due to the war: “And in the dark we will take off our

clothes / And they’ll be placing fingers through the notches in your spine.” 

Whatever the act being described here, it is almost certainly invasive. 

Perhaps it refers to the fear of discovery and loss of privacy that accompanied

Anne’s life in hiding, or even her eventual experience in the concentration

camp where she died.

But it is still more compelling that the two-headed boy

represents not just Anne the historical figure, but Anne as Mangum

psychologically perceives her.  In an interview in Puncture magazine, he

reveals that Anne’s diary gave him a uniquely personal perception of her:

“While I was reading the book, she was completely alive to me…[I was] as deep

as you can go in someone’s head, in some ways deeper than you can go with

someone you know in the flesh” (McGonigal, 1998, pp. 21-22).  So maybe the jar

is not just an agent that separates Anne from the outside world, but a symbol

for all that separates Anne from Mangum in spite of his intimate knowledge of

her life and personality.  Accordingly, Kim Cooper (2005) sees the jar as a

“metaphor for impermeable time, a transparent barrier between souls” (p. 72). 

Mangum’s conception of Anne is preserved such that it can come to life within

the confines of his imagination but is nonetheless a static entity.

In the final verse, the speaker attempts to comfort the

heartbroken two-headed boy:

Two-headed boy

There’s no reason to grieve

The world that you need is wrapped in gold silver sleeves

Left beneath Christmas trees in the snow

And I will take you and leave you alone

Watching spirals of white softly flow

Over your eyelids and all you did

Will wait until the point when you let go

Mangum explains that, “At the end, everything he’s ever wanted is in

these packages under a Christmas tree in the snow” (Carioli, 1998).  The image

of discarded trees left to wither in the snow after the holidays have ended

relates to Anne as well, who longed for open celebration instead of the muted

festivities that marked holidays and birthdays in the Annex (Frank, 1997).  Due

to Mangum’s spiritual beliefs regarding the color white (as outlined in his

aforementioned explanation for “King of Carrot Flowers Part 2″ in the LP’s

lyric insert), the line about “spirals of white” warrants a closer look.  While

it could simply be a description of snow falling over the boy, it may also be a

reference to the white light that Mangum believes is contained in all things. 

The color white is also significant in Anne’s diary; she reproduces a poem her

father wrote for her, where he describes her, clad in her white robe in the

night, as a “figure in white” (Frank, 1997, p. 119).  She admires and agrees

with this description, quoting it twice: first as it appears in the complete

poem, and then again later in a brief three-line excerpt.  The speaker, in a

hushed, low whisper, tries to sing the two-headed boy to sleep—or to death—as

his spiritual essence surrounds him, and the song eventually becomes a wordless

lullaby.  This morbid interpretation is supported by another conspicuous

addition of extraneous material to the album’s lyrics insert.  Right after the

final line of “Two-Headed Boy,” he adds a quote from the song, “Oh, Sister,” an

unreleased song that appears in a performance recorded between the releases of On

Avery Island and Aeroplane (line breaks are added):

Oh sister now that we’re grieving

Our fingers will falter our lungs will be leaking

All over each other and without even speaking

We’ll know that it’s over and smile and go greeting

Whatever comes next

This is certainly the most vital unreleased song from the pre-Aeroplane

era because it relates strongly to several songs on the album.  “Communist

Daughter,” “Ghost,” and, crucially, “Oh Comely” share lyrics and musical

elements with “Oh Sister,” and it is included in the lyric insert directly

after the final lines of “Two-Headed Boy” ostensibly because the two songs

share the verb “grieve,” as well as a general connotation of mourning and

melancholy.  The themes of death in the songs that directly follow give even

more support to the presence of mortality in “Two-Headed Boy.”  The next song

with lyrics, “Holland, 1945,” begins with a direct description of Anne’s death,

while the interlude that connects the two—”The Fool”—has the atmosphere of a

funeral march.

The interlude’s ominous drums enter in the last two bars of

the closing lullaby of “Two-Headed Boy” to form a seamless transition,

transforming the melancholy of the lullaby into heavy despair.  One of the

album’s two instrumental tracks, “The Fool” was written by horn player Scott

Spillane, who also arranged the horns with producer Robert Schneider (Cooper,

2005).  It is the only song on the record to leave out Mangum’s voice and

guitar playing^[6]. It is

also the only song that does not credit Mangum with having had a hand in

composition^[7].  In

fact, “The Fool” was not even originally intended for the album; Spillane

penned it for a friend—Joey Foreman—to use in the soundtrack to a movie of the

same name (ibid).  Nonetheless, the song is organically integrated into the

album despite its independent origins and distinct instrumentation.  In this

context it functions as a segue between two markedly different-sounding songs connected

by a common theme of melancholy and grief.

These

themes are elicited by evoking a funereal aura, a fitting transition between a

song hinting at the end of Anne Frank’s life and another exploring the

implications of her death.  The somberly blaring horns, militant snare,

tambourine, and crashing cymbals are all appropriately gloomy.  The horns here

are a particularly good showcase of Spillane’s signature bombastic, slightly

off-key technique.  There’s also an accordion, a possible reference to the “accordion

keys” Mangum sings of in the previous song.  The song’s dark tonality bears an

Eastern European folk influence, but its instrumentation and arrangement also

evoke the boisterous jubilance of circus music turned inside-out, hinting at

the potential sideshow freak connotations of the two-headed boy.

“The Fool”

takes the harmonic center on a brief detour away from G major to D natural

minor.  The simple chord changes mainly alternate between D minor and A minor

in the verse, and between Bb major and F major in the bridge.  The dark melody

is stated clearly in the primary section by two or three horns in unison over a

deep bass.  Accordion chords provide the only other harmonic structure.  The

chorus allows the horns to fan out and opens up the harmonic space of the

song.  Here the horns hold out chords emphasizing suspended ninths, muted over

Bb major and expanding dynamically over the F major.  In the following

recapitulation of the theme, the harmony is thickened by two ragged, seemingly

extemporaneous countermelodies, one in the middle register of the trumpet, and

another in the highest register of the accordion.  The theme leaps up an octave

at the end to close the song on a grim fanfare.

The

following song, “Holland, 1945,” contrasts dramatically as the speaker inverts

his grief in a desperate attempt to find beauty in spite of the suffering

around him.  The only Aeroplane single, “Holland, 1945″ was released as

a 7″ picture disc in October of 1998 with “Engine” as a b-side.  While the

album’s title track may seem a more obvious choice to represent the album, it

is easy to see why this song was picked.  Where “In the Aeroplane over the Sea”

hints at the album’s central theme of the conflict between earthly beauty and

the eternal peace of death, “Holland, 1945″ confronts it directly, eliciting

not just contentment, but celebration from tragedy.  Further, with its

thrashing drums, distorted bass, churning acoustic guitar, and soaring horns,

it’s a much better representation of the archetypal chaotic sound of the

ensemble than the uncharacteristically serene title track. 

Multi-instrumentalist Julian Koster claims that this chaos was one of the

central defining elements of the group’s aesthetic:

I think I really recognized

how important that chaos was, how much of the magic of what was happening

radiated through that chaos.  In a weird way, I felt that the record was

supposed to be chaotic: there needed to be an explosion if there was going to

be a record of the thing.  Maybe loving that chaos was part of my job [...] Also,

the way Jeremy [Barnes] played the drums—the sheer volume—and the band’s

absolute desire to capture it, affected the approach of recording

tremendously.  (Cooper, 2005, pp. 63-64)

After

Mangum counts in the song with a casual “…two, one-two-three-four,” the

ensemble kicks in at full steam, and the intensity remains at the redline for

the duration of the song.  Like the similarly chaotic “King of Carrot Flowers

Part 3,” the drums are a churning, dominating presence, despite being pushed low

in the mix to accommodate the force of the distorted bass and acoustic

guitars.  Accordingly, the acoustic guitar and Mangum’s vocals are doubled

seemingly just to break through the sheer sound mass.  As in that song, the

vocal melody carries through due to a vacancy in the middle and upper middle

frequencies of the sonic space, caused by an emphasis of the low and low middle

frequencies of the guitar, bass, and drums, and the high-frequency white noise

haze of the crashing cymbals.  All instruments and vocals are performed at

nearly top volume and intensity throughout.

“Holland,

1945″ returns to the G major key that was briefly abandoned during “The

Fool.”   Though the transition is somewhat abrupt, it is eased by the opening C

major chord, which pivots from the vii of D minor in “The Fool,” to the IV of G

major.  As in the “King of Carrot Flowers” suite, “Holland, 1945″ consists

solely of I, IV, and V chords arranged in various orders.  Like that of

“Two-Headed Boy,” the verse melody of “Holland, 1945″ is based on a three-note

fragment consisting of three consecutive scale degrees which is then shifted

downward.  In the same way as that song, the initial fragment is repeated twice

and then extended further after its demodulation (see fig. 3.2). Here, that fragment

starts on the fifth, sixth, and seventh scale degrees, then demodulates to the

first, second, and third degrees and repeats there several times with some

variations.  The whole-tone intervals between each note in the melody are

preserved.

Fig 3.2: The vocal melody of verse one from “Holland, 1945.”

The chorus melody also bears similarities to the refrain of “Two-Headed

Boy.”  Each is loosely based on a repeating descending scale, and in “Holland,

1945″ that scale ranges from G above middle C to G an octave lower, skipping

the fourth scale degree.  Horns echo this descent in moving thirds at each

pass.  The vocals end at the bridge as the final flourish on the word “eyes”

quotes the basic three-note building block of the verse and leaps up an octave.

The lyrics of “Holland, 1945″ delve even further into the

life of Anne Frank, this time exploring her death in particular.  The song is

named for the region where she was captured in hiding and the year in which she

died.  The first verse contains a few specific details about her death:

The only girl I’ve ever loved

Was born with roses in her eyes

But then they buried her alive

One evening 1945

With just her sister at her side

And only weeks before the guns

All came and rained on everyone

Upon her apprehension, Anne

was transferred to a concentration camp—Bergen-Belson near Hannover—with only

her sister, and they were likely buried together (Frank, 1997).  She was not

actually buried alive of course—like her sister, she died of a Typhus outbreak

originating from the camp’s deplorable hygienic conditions (ibid).  Mangum

likely puts it this way either because he found the words euphonious or because

they express a conviction that, though her life was cut off so early, she lived

as fully as she could, even up until the end.  She is believed to have died in

February or March, indeed just weeks before the Allied Forces achieved military

victory in Germany (ibid).  But more importantly Mangum uses Anne’s story to

explore the relationship between suffering and beauty, and how they can exist

concurrently.  Proclaiming his love for her, the speaker establishes her

innocence early on with the “roses” image.  But by the end of the song, he

laments how she has become dehumanized, the roses replaced with flies despite

his desire to preserve her purity.  In order to come to terms with her tragic

death, the speaker imagines her reincarnation:

Now she’s a little boy in Spain

Playing pianos filled with flames

On empty rings around the sun

All sing to say my dream has come

Desperate to find joy in her

story, he convinces himself that she still exists in some form, celebrating

even as he acknowledges the hopelessly grim circumstances that surround his

momentary happiness.  An entry from Anne’s diary best sums up his emotional

state: “[W]hat are you supposed to do if you become part of the suffering? 

You’d be completely lost.  On the contrary, beauty remains, even in misfortune”

(Frank, 1997, p. 208).  The triumphant vocal melody and raucous accompaniment

of the refrain breathe joy into what would otherwise come off as resignation:

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

Only by preserving past joy

in some form can the speaker bring himself to go on living.  This amounts to an

utter denial of the suffering that surrounds him, which he blots out with

comforting spiritual interpretations and carefree celebration.  This accounts

for the song’s almost hysterically joyous and exuberant sound in contrast to the

morbid lyrical content.

The second verse

advances the example of Anne Frank’s death, and offers another perspective on

how the speaker finds comfort in spite of her tragic demise.  Longing for

beauty and frustrated by its destruction all around him, he is comforted by a

visit from the ghost of a deceased friend:

And now we ride the circus wheel

With your dark brother wrapped in white

Says it was good to be alive

But now he rides a comet’s flame

And won’t be coming back again

The Earth looks better from a star

That’s right above from where you are

Again, the color white makes

an appearance.  If considered according to Mangum’s spiritual beliefs involving

an eternal white light that pervades all things, the brother is dead (“dark”)

but his spirit is imbued with an undying glow now that he has passed into an

incorporeal realm.  He enjoyed life, but found greater peace in death,

suggesting some higher plane of existence beyond.  In an article for the Boston

Phoenix, Carol Carioli (1998) reveals that this verse is about the suicide

of the brother of one of Mangum’s friends.  Another brief addition to the

lyrics in the LP’s insert supports this insight.  Right after the words “your

dark brother,” Mangum appends the initials “h.p.” in parentheses.  Though it is

unclear exactly to whom they refer, this suggests that the brother in the song

is indeed about a real, specific person.   The last four lines of this verse

apparently refer to a suicide by self-inflicted gunshot:

He didn’t mean to make you cry

With sparks that ring and bullets fly

On empty rings around your heart

The world just screams and falls apart

He is comforted by a belief

that the brother meant no harm—he only wanted to escape the pain of life and

move on to a more peaceful form of existence.  The second verse also reveals

something of an astronomical theme that hints at an overarching concept of the

universal versus the personal.  The brother rides a comet and views planet

Earth from a star, and in the first verse, the speaker’s joy is all-encompassing

as he celebrates along with everything within the “empty rings around the sun,”

ostensibly the orbits of the planets.  In contrast, his friend’s grief is

highly personal, contained only within “empty rings around your heart.”  The

final lines recall the song’s initial innocent image of Anne and contrast it

with the dehumanization she was ultimately subjected to:

And it’s so sad to see the world agree

That they’d rather see their faces filled with flies

All when I’d want to keep white roses in their eyes

The color white reappears

again, this time to describe Anne’s innocence.  Kim Cooper (2005) points out

the peculiar similarity of these lines to the Munich-based anti-Nazi White Rose

movement of the 1940s, but notes that Mangum had never heard of it when he

wrote the song.  It is more likely, then, that he used the white roses in the

same sense that he describes the whiteness that enwraps the dark brother.  The

white roses that cover Anne’s eyes also resemble the “spirals of white” that

flow over the eyelids of the two-headed boy, further evidence of the connection

between her and this symbolic character.

As the speaker’s

voice soars up an octave, filled with longing, the ensemble closes out the song

with a horn arrangement consisting of a playful interchange between a slide

trombone and the high descending moving thirds of the chorus.  It evokes circus

music in a genuinely festive manner, in contrast to the sardonic gloom of “The

Fool,” referencing the ride aboard the circus wheel with the dark brother.

The hazy

fantasy of “Communist Daughter” emerges fluently from the glee of “Holland,

1945.”  While they were obviously recorded separately, “Communist Daughter”

begins on the same G major chord that ends “Holland, 1945,” so the tape is

simply spliced between that song’s final chord and the opening strum of

“Communist Daughter” with surprisingly little interruption.  Amusingly, it

opens with the inverse of the count-in that starts “Holland, 1945;” here Mangum

simply mutters, “one” on the first downbeat, which was conspicuously omitted

from the count-in of “Holland.”  The acoustic guitar plainly outlines the

song’s simple I-V-IV chord progression as an organ oscillates between F# and G

on each beat.  All the while a sound collage of tape loops, transistor radio

static, and scraps of white noise flutter in the background.  The vocal melody

is the album’s most minimal, consisting of only four notes and rarely straying

from the G major triad.

Mangum sings

the words in a low baritone whisper, reflecting the intimacy and introversion

of the psychosexual lyrics, which juxtapose fundamental sexual imagery with

nature.  The communist daughter uses masturbation to affirm her own identity:

And wanting something warm and moving

Bends towards herself

The soothing proves that she must still exist

She moves herself about her fist

But just as sexual pleasure

confirms reality for her, it alters her perception thereof:

Sweetness sings from every corner

Cars careening from the clouds

The bridges burst and twist around

Meanwhile, “Semen stains the

mountaintops.”  It is not immediately clear who exactly the communist daughter

is and why this vignette manifests itself in the speaker’s mind.  Perhaps the

speaker’s euphoria in “Holland, 1945,” fueled by a blissful denial of the suffering

around him, gives way to a near total loss of contact with reality.  Visions of

the communist daughter could be an extreme perpetuation of his escapism from

the pain of existence.  He has become so introverted that he plunges into the

depths of his own psyche, manifesting the image of the communist daughter to

represent his own subconscious urges.  The episode may also serve to introduce

sexuality in an innocent light in order to make its defilement all the more

disturbing in the subsequent “Oh Comely,” undoubtedly the album’s darkest

song.  These two songs are connected more concretely in that they both borrow

lyrics from a particularly sexual verse of the aforementioned bootleg, “Oh

Sister,” which contains the couplet “To prove that she must still exist / she

moves herself about her fist.”  In that song the lines refer to Rose Wallace

Goldaline, a character that reappears hauntingly at the end of “Oh Comely.”

As for the purpose

and identity of the communist daughter herself, there are several possibilities. 

She almost certainly plays a similar role to that of the two-headed boy,

functioning as a conduit for an overlying theme—in this case, sexuality and

reality.  She seems to be almost a blank slate, with no personal features, her

existence defined only by sexual pleasure.  In this respect, Cooper (2005) sees

the communist daughter as something of a universal character, “a hermaphroditic

fusion of man/woman, human/god, body/spirit.  All things are present within the

selves painted here” (p. 74).  It seems more plausible, however, that just the

opposite is true: that the communist daughter represents a self in the most

narrowly-defined terms.  While there is some blurring between her self and that

of the speaker, she is ultimately completely self-absorbed—the essence of

masturbation in a sense—and reality is defined completely through her altered

perception of the world around her, which is in turn dictated merely by her

immediate physical sensations.

It is likely that Anne

Frank’s diary influenced the imagery of this vignette.  As she progressed

through puberty, she detailed many similar episodes of self-discovery.  She

wrote openly about the mental and physical changes she experienced, and some of

her entries bear a resemblance to the tone of “Communist Daughter,” especially

the following:

Sometimes when I lie in bed at

night I feel a terrible urge to touch my breasts and listen to the quiet

beating of my heart [...] Every time I see a female nude, such as the Venus in my

art history book, I go into ecstasy.  Sometimes I find them so exquisite I have

to hold back my tears! (Frank, 1997, p. 159)

Just as Anne permeates the rest of

the album, there’s little doubt that she inhabits part of the communist

daughter.  For both Anne and the communist daughter, sexuality has the power to

coat reality with a glow of exhilaration and inhibit logical interpretation of

reality.

The collage

of tape loops and white noise supports the unreality of the scene.  While

initially registering as a noisy haze, a close listen to the background sound

design reveals its detailed allegorical role.  Much of Jeff Mangum’s early

musical composition consisted of abstract musique concrète pieces

comprised of manipulated field recordings and tape loops, so the background

noise of “Communist Daughter” is something of a nod to those formative years. 

Field recordings of various outdoor environments are subjected to a variety of

simple manipulative techniques to transform their sounds.  At the beginning of

the song, high-pitched sounds—perhaps oscillators or noises altered by

high-frequency delays—play alongside and emulate the sounds of real field

recordings of crickets, which in turn subside into washes of white noise. 

Orchestral samples and some unidentifiably manipulated sounds are modularly

speed- or pitch-shifted to imitate the Doppler effect of passing cars in

reference to the “cars careening from the clouds,” as the fragmented and warped

bursts of white noise and transistor radio clips evoke the way “the bridges

burst and twist around.”  The disparate sounds eventually fuse together into a

drone of overlapping out-of-phase loops.  The orchestral clips develop a steady

pitch on B, and, as a trumpet coda enters, a second layer of orchestral clips

emerges sounding an octave higher, an effect likely produced by running the

lower samples at double speed.  The loops continue after the conventional

instrumentation has faded and disappear layer by layer, the decaying residue of

reverie.

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Come back tomorrow for the final installment of Max Heath’s thesis… Update: The final installment is available now: Pts. Four and Five. If you missed the first installment, read Pts. One and Two now.

If you don’t already own this album, you owe it to yourself to buy it: Amazon, eMusic. Seriously. You need it.