The final 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 earlier installments, read Pts. One and Two and Pt. Three 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.

4

 

As the hallucinatory wisps

of “Communist Daughter” smolder and fade, the album descends into a new

emotional depth for its final swoop, which comprises side two of the vinyl LP

version.  At over eight minutes long, the next track, “Oh Comely,” towers over

the rest of the songs.  It can be divided into three main sections; the first

and second sections share similar chord changes but have different melodies,

while the third is a formerly self-contained song previously titled “Goldaline”

that is added on as a haunting coda (Cooper, 2005).

An E major chord

opens the song, strummed on acoustic guitar in 3/4 with a vaguely menacing

swing.  E major will become the dominant key for much of the rest of the

album.  The song is mostly a single-take guitar and vocal performance, with the

exception of some doubled vocals and horns that enter later on.  In fact, the

recording on the album preserves what was meant to be only a test of microphone

levels with a few bars (ibid).  Instead, Mangum, apparently swept up with the

power of the song, plows through its entire duration with a remarkable,

emotionally-wrought performance.  His voice assumes the timbre of a sorrowful,

pained moan.  The chord progression consists of E major alternating with C

major, but the melody of the first section superimposes E natural minor over

the E major chord.  Here Mangum’s loud, deep voice dominates the guitar’s

tonality, which buries its major thirds by emphasizing the low fifth.  Though

the major tonality is clear during the instrumental breaks, as he sings the minor

vocal melody all but obliterates the major key.  This domination reflects the

song’s subject matter, which laments the imposition of one force upon another,

the invasion of suffering where it does not belong.

At the outset, the

speaker seems to be anticipating the death of a loved one: “Oh comely / I will

be with you when you lose your breath.”  This foreboding is akin to the

feelings Mangum experienced as he read Anne Frank’s diary.  In an interview

shortly after the album’s release, he recalled, “I pretty much knew what was

going to happen.  But that’s the thing: you love people because you know their

story” (McGonigal, 1998, pp. 21-22).  He expressed frustration that he could

feel so close to someone who eventually “gets disposed of like a piece of trash”

(ibid).  Here, the word “comely” is surrounded by ugliness and decay, just as

Anne was a beautiful presence amidst an abhorrent tragedy.  Next, the key

shifts to G major as the speaker briefly reflects on the contentment of the

past: “Chasing the only meaningful memory you thought you had left / [...] It

isn’t as pretty as you’d like to guess / In your memory.”  The G major key is

reminiscent of the relative happiness of the previous few songs—the joy of the

title track, the comforting pathos of “Two-Headed Boy,” the celebration of

“Holland, 1945,” and the explorative, escapist fantasy of “Communist

Daughter”—which are themselves already fading into vaguely pleasant memories

under the weight of “Oh Comely.”  Likewise, Anne often used nostalgia as a

crutch, but her memories only produced temporary relief, which in turn quickly

subsided into melancholy.  As the key shifts back to the E major/minor hybrid,

Mangum proclaims, “It doesn’t mean anything at all,” as if to say that the

unrequited longing Anne endured as she suffered to prolong her life was

pointless since she died before it could be satisfied.

The next verse

seems to address Anne’s isolation during her time in hiding:

Oh comely

All of your friends are all letting you blow

Bristling and ugly

Bursting with fruits falling out from the holes

Of some pretty bright and bubbly

Friend you could need to say comforting things in your ear

But oh comely

There isn’t such one friend that you could find here

One of the consistent themes of

Anne’s diary is her desire for a true friend who could understand her and with

whom she could share her deepest secrets.  She acknowledges repeatedly that her

diary is in some ways a substitute for such a friend.  In her times of personal

despair, her principal complaint is that no one, not even her parents,

understands her.  In a letter to her father, she claims that nobody in the

house even cares about her suffering: “When I was having problems, everyone—and

that includes you—closed their eyes and ears and didn’t help me” (Frank, 1997,

p. 279).  The image of fruit flourishing within a vacuum of loneliness implies

that no one around her was able or willing to access the beautiful products of

her overflowing imagination and personality.  The song returns to G major as

the speaker’s mind drifts to violence: “Standing next to me / He’s only my

enemy / I’ll crush him with everything I own.”  Here the identities of the

speaker and who is being spoken of become distorted as these violent impulses

surface.  The speaker could be lashing out at his own enemy or perhaps he

sardonically inhabits the perspective of those who ended Anne’s life simply

because she was designated an enemy.

As the key returns to E

major, Mangum’s voice soars to the top of his range for the refrain: “Say what

you want to say / And hang for your hollow ways / Moving your mouth to pull out

all your miracle for me.”  The last line of the refrain obscures the

perspective even more, as it is so similar to a passage about Anne from the

album’s title track:

Now how I remember you

How I would push my fingers through

Your mouth to make those muscles move

That made your voice so smooth and sweet

This disturbing resemblance

connects the speaker’s desire to reanimate Anne’s body with the violent,

repugnant actions of those who killed her.  Perhaps here the speaker finds his

obsessive yearning to make Anne live again for his own pleasure comparably

perverse to the actions of the agents of her demise.

Much of “Oh Comely,”

especially the second section, borrows melodic, thematic, and lyrical content

from its predecessor, “Oh Sister.”  Mangum alluded to the similarity between

these two songs in the earliest available live recording of his music, a solo

acoustic concert on July 4, 1996, at Aquarius Records in San Francisco.  While

the first half of the song contains a few key words that appear in “Oh Comely,”

such as “milking” and the titular “comely,” the second half is so similar to

the second section of “Oh Comely” that it sounds like an embryonic form of the

latter.  Despite their different time signatures and tempos—”Oh Sister” is in

4/4 and much faster—the melodies of the two songs share many similarities in

rhythm and pitch.  Moreover, the vocal lines of both the first and second

sections of “Oh Comely” are variations of a single melody from “Oh Sister” (see

fig. 4.1-4.3).

height="156" src="http://www.gloriousnoise.com/images/Fig41Ohsister.jpg" title="The vocal melody from the beginning of the second section of 'Oh Sister.'">

Fig. 4.1: The vocal melody from the beginning of the second section of “Oh Sister.”

height="159" src="http://www.gloriousnoise.com/images/Fig42Ohcomely.jpg" title="The vocal melody from the first verse of 'Oh Comely.'">

Fig. 4.2: The vocal melody from the first verse of “Oh Comely.”

height="95" src="http://www.gloriousnoise.com/images/Fig43Ohcomely2.jpg" title="The beginning of the vocal melody from the second section of 'Oh Comely.'">

Fig. 4.3: The beginning of the vocal melody from the second section of “Oh Comely.”

Both the second section of “Oh

Comely” and the second half of “Oh Sister” feature long, repetitive verses with

a flood of lyrics, and their common theme of sexuality connects them even more

closely.  The lyrics of “Oh Sister” discuss the dark side of sexuality:

Rose Wallace Goldaline just moves her mouth over anything

Fleshy free and flowering with oranges out in the open

But don’t you waste your sins again

She don’t need you

Or won’t fuck your friends

And you, you’re American, so important boiling over

To prove that she must still exist

She moves herself about her fist

And does never ever give a shit

About all those words you’re wasting again

Some pretty bright and bubbly wondrous dream

You’d like to kill and claim

And claim her as your own

But don’t you worry

All those dainty and dirty emotions just go away and fade out on their own

The fertile beauty of

Goldaline—who reappears later in “Oh Comely”—provokes perverse sexual fantasies

in her admirers.  The profanity in this song—a rare occurrence in the Neutral

Milk Hotel discography—dispels any romantic notions about sex, depicting it as

a vile and sinful act.  Here sexual desire is conceived as an invasive

imposition of power upon an innocent victim.  The second section of “Oh Comely”

approaches sexuality in a more conflicted fashion, juxtaposing its ugliness

with its capacity for beauty:

Your father made fetuses

With flesh licking ladies

While you and your mother

Were asleep in the trailer park

Thunderous sparks from the dark of the stadiums

The music and medicine you needed for comforting

So make all your fat fleshy fingers to moving

And pluck all your silly strings

And bend all your notes for me

Soft silly music is meaningful magical

The movements were beautiful

All in your ovaries

All of them milking with green fleshy flowers

While powerful pistons were sugary sweet machines

Smelling of semen all under the garden

Was all you were needing when you still believed in me

The description of reproduction in

the first two lines is somewhat repulsive as the speaker associates sex with a

father’s betrayal of his daughter and her mother.  Mangum says these particular

lyrics reflect his disgust “about sex being used as a tool for power”

(McGonigal, 1998, p. 21).  But almost immediately afterward sexuality is viewed

as a soothing source of healing.  At the same time, the image of “fat fleshy

fingers,” sung with a scornful sneer, carries on the repellent undertones of

the first few lines.  The connotation reverses yet again and beauty wins out as

sexuality is likened to the mystical and emotional qualities of music and the

sublime power of nature.  Throughout the second section, the vocal melody

yields to the major tonality of the E major chord, but reverts to E minor over

the alternating C major chord.  This constant oscillation in key supports the

lyrical ambivalence between the grotesque and the beautiful.  It is worth

noting that the repeated use of the word “fleshy” may ground this section in

Anne’s diary.  In a detailed description of her own vagina, Anne uses this word

twice in a single paragraph to describe its various parts (Frank, 1997).  After

the refrain, the dynamics fall and Mangum’s vocals are doubled in a low, eerie,

wordless melody.  The guitar goes tacet as the last low E sustains for several

seconds.  This note divides the preceding imagery of fertility from a

chillingly direct reference to Anne’s death:

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

Though this blurs the facts

somewhat, Anne was likely indeed buried in Bergen-Belson’s mass graves,

possibly along with her sister (ibid). The vocal doubling just before these

lyrics is the album’s most conspicuous use of the technique, representing one

of the few artificial invasions upon the live performance captured in the

song.  Here the effect endows Mangum’s voice with an otherworldly grief.  It

invokes a shared experience of mourning, conjuring voices from the past buried

along with Anne.  He sings of Anne’s death over the decaying echoes of the last

note of the doubled voices, and this morbid reference contrasts sharply with

the overflowing fecundity of the previous verse.  The juxtaposition harkens

back to the original premise of its doppelganger section in “Oh Sister,” where

violent sexual urges threaten to destroy a fertile beauty.  In the

corresponding section of “Oh Comely,” the threat is physically enacted,

resulting in the real eradication of something beautiful.  In this light, the

preceding verse becomes a compendium of all that was lost in this destruction. 

The section ends with the ominous mantra: “Know all your enemies / We know who

our enemies are.”  This could be a reference to the fear Anne and her family

experienced in hiding.  The rhythmically propulsive strumming is abandoned

here.  Instead, each chord is struck once and sustained as Mangum taps the body

of the guitar to produce a muted rhythm resembling a heartbeat.  At the end of

the second repetition, Mangum’s voice glides up an octave on the word “are.” 

The guitar accompaniment disappears temporarily as his voice sustains the high

note nakedly, bridging the gap before the final section.  A trumpet enters in

unison as the word morphs into that section’s wordless melodic theme.

While the

tonality, basic harmonic structure, and relative psychological state of the

previous section are preserved, many clear differences reveal the final

section’s origins as a separate song.  The time signature shifts to 4/4, the

guitar plays straight, propulsive eighth notes, and the tempo accelerates.  The

order of the shift from minor to major is reversed and the C major chord is

replaced with A minor.  After the introductory theme, the section contains a

single brief verse:

Goldaline my dear

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 stranger’s stomach

Place your body here

Let your skin begin to blend itself with mine

This section is best understood

through Mangum’s own explanation: “One of my new songs talks about Siamese

twins freezing to death in the forest… One is saying, ‘Don’t worry.  We’ve been

attached forever, and we’ll end up in someone else’s stomach together anyway’”

(Carioli, 1998).  So it seems the identity of the speaker has shifted as well. 

The image of twins and the comforting intent brings to mind the two-headed

boy.  Just as the speaker tried to console the boy with sleep, here one twin

tries to comfort the other with the thought of eternal peace in death.  This

notion has analogs in Anne’s diary, where she sometimes finds herself wishing

for death to end her struggle:

I’ve asked myself again and again

whether it wouldn’t have been better if we hadn’t gone into hiding, if we were

dead now and didn’t have to go through this misery, especially so that the

others could be spared the burden…

     Let something

happen soon, even an air raid.  Nothing can be more crushing than this anxiety. 

Let the end come, however cruel; at least then we’ll know whether we are to be

the victors or the vanquished. (Frank, 1997, pp. 303-304)

Elsewhere:

It’s utterly impossible for me to

build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death.  I see the world

being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder

that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. (Frank,

1997, p. 328)

Death is no longer abstract or

distant as it was casually avoided in “Holland, 1945,” but devastatingly real. 

The twins, like Anne, are cut off from all of humanity in their ultimate

isolation.  And Anne, buried in a mass grave, was in a sense fused to others

who died with her.  The twins could even represent the speaker’s emotional

state as he merges his own identity with Anne’s in a dislocated sort of

introjection.  The following “Ghost” examines this idea more directly,

imagining Anne’s ghost within the speaker’s own soul.  As all optimism is

abandoned, the last words in turn blend with a final repetition of the

Goldaline theme, the vocals doubled and supported by a full horn arrangement,

reminiscent of the thick gloom of “The Fool” in its dark tonality and crude

countermelodies.  The horns—especially the trumpet—are played so loudly that

they go sharp, and this dissonance underscores the impact of the mourning as

the song ends in a grim A minor.

“Ghost” returns to E

major, opening with an upbeat strumming pattern, the roots on the downbeat and

the full chords on the off-beats in the style of bluegrass or Irish folk.  The

Irish influences come to the fore in the untitled adjoined instrumental track

that follows.  This propulsive strumming technique endows the song with a sense

of urgency.  After a few measures of unaccompanied guitar, the explosively

distorted bass from “King of Carrot Flowers Part 2 and 3″ enters, evoking the

same implication of superhuman power.  “Ghost” shares that song’s sublime

spiritual connotations, as well as the death-obsessed frenzy of “Holland,

1945.”

Another song made

entirely out of I, IV, and V chords, “Ghost” takes the form of a 24-bar blues

pattern in the first verse.  The speaker sings of a spirit that haunts him in a

spiraling melody over the E major chord, which is then transposed up a fourth

over the A major chord.  After it modulates back down for the return to E,

Mangum’s voice rises on the last note of the melody, then trills around its

descent from D# to B over the V-IV-I cadence, reflecting the whirling flight of

the ghost.  Anne Frank is present in this song as well:

When I started writing

"Ghost," … we thought we had a ghost living in the house, in the

bathroom. So I locked the door and started to sing to the ghost in the

bathroom. But that was sort of like singing about the ghost who we thought was

whistling in the other room, and that kept waking me up, and then also a ghost

that may or may not live within me. And it ended up being a reference to Anne

Frank, too. (McGonigal, 1998, p. 21)

The lyrics reflect the ghost’s

transitional locus:

Ghost, ghost I know you live within me

Feel as you fly

In thunder clouds above the city

Into one that I love

With all that was left within me

‘Til we tore in two

Now wings and rings and there’s so many waiting here for you

The ghost first resides within the

speaker, flies around the city, and fuses with Anne Frank.  At this point,

apparently, the speaker still feels spiritually merged with the ghost, until

finally they split off from one another.  “Rings” could be a reference to the

word as it is used in “Holland, 1945;” the ghost may be traveling through outer

space (“rings around the sun”), or surrounding the speaker’s own soul (“rings

around your heart”).  At the start of the second verse, the drums enter.  The

bass drum marks each beat and snare drum rim clicks sound on each offbeat in

tandem with the rhythmic strumming of the guitar.  Explosive snare rolls and

cymbal crashes punctuate the end of each pair of measures.  The added

percussion propels the song forward and elevates the tension.  A trumpet enters

low in the mix as well, matching the sustained root notes of the distorted

bass.  The speaker imagines Anne’s birth as a sacred spiritual event:

And she was born in a bottle rocket 1929

With wings that ringed around a socket right between her spine

All drenched in milk and holy water pouring from the sky

I know that she will live forever

She won’t ever die

Anne was indeed born in 1929, and

here she is depicted as an angel, consecrated and covered with life-sustaining

milk.  Whereas in “Holland, 1945″ and “Oh Comely” he lamented her death and

dehumanization, here the speaker celebrates her everlasting sanctity, finally

assured that she never truly died after all now that her spirit lives on.  This

assertion implies a response to Anne’s own repeatedly expressed desire for

immortality:  “I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people.  I want to

be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met.  I want

to go on living even after my death!” (Frank, 1997, p. 247).  From the speaker’s

perspective, she lives on not just because of her story, but because of the

visceral connection he shares with her.  At this point the song deviates from

the form of the first verse for the refrain: “She goes and now she knows she’ll

never be afraid.”  Anne has been liberated from her earthly struggles and is no

longer subject to fear and suffering.  The wordless melody continues as the

horns and drums swell, building the intensity further.  Part of the melody and

lyrics for this section are adapted from the ending of an unreleased song, “My

Dream Girl.”  It’s an appropriate reference, as that song was about a girl who

died at the age of five, apparently before the speaker could even meet her. 

Nonetheless her soul persists: “And this day I can still hear the sound / Of a

life in outer space.”

At the third verse, the

offbeat clicks are replaced by full snare hits and the fills become louder,

more extensive, and more chaotic.  Just as in “Holland, 1945,” Mangum

reinforces his conception of Anne through the story of another untimely death. 

Here a girl falls from a blazing apartment in New York.  Just like Anne, though

her earthly life is cut short, her spirit lives eternally.  After the refrain,

Mangum’s voice soars upward and the song’s ever-increasing tension finally

erupts in catharsis.  Zanzithophone^[8] and the

singing saw play the theme in unison, seemingly conjuring the spirit of the

ghost herself: the return of the bowed saw that symbolized Anne’s disembodied

voice on “In the Aeroplane over the Sea” suggests that her ghost has joined in

to sing along.  As the melody ends, the chaos is pushed to its final extreme,

drums thrashing on every eighth note as the bass sustains relentlessly.  A

chorus of horns and the zanzithophone repeat the final note in shorter and

shorter periods as a dissonant electronically-delayed sound adds to the mass. 

The wailing saw—the ghost’s manifestation—quavers above all the other sounds,

swoops down, soars upward and vanishes on the final attack.

The distorted bass

sustains into the following untitled instrumental, a raucous, celebratory

eruption over the I and V from the previous song.  The Irish connotations

implicit in the strumming pattern of “Ghost” become more prevalent as the

principal melodic instrument here is the uilleann pipes, a traditional Irish

instrument similar to the Scottish bagpipes.  The melody is highly ornamental,

filled with trills and flourishes, accompanied by acoustic guitar and organ. 

The theme is broken by short whimsical bursts of sliding trombone and organ

arpeggios, evoking the frivolous glee of circus music one last time.  The song

is a jumble of odd juxtapositions: the traditional uilleann pipes and folk

guitar with the modernity of the electronic organ and distorted bass; the Irish

and circus connotations with a low-fidelity rock sensibility.  It’s a sonic

portrayal of the dislocation and anachronism present throughout much of the

album’s thematic content.  On the repetition of the theme, vocal harmonies

enter with a chorus of triads.  Containing the only vocal harmonies since the

end of the first song, this section indulges in one final return to innocence

and carefree happiness before the wistful melancholy of the final song.

The sustained last note

of the uilleann pipes fades into a morass of electronically-delayed noise, out

of which emerges the opening of “Two-Headed Boy Pt. Two”.  The singing saw

makes its final appearance with a slow, haunting reprise of its multi-tracked

theme from “In the Aeroplane over the Sea.”  Evoking the album’s central theme

of longing for joy amid suffering, the familiar sound is a faded memory of

happier times that feeds into the sentimental quality of the album’s concluding

song.  The line actually begins in the G major key of “Aeroplane” but modulates

gradually and microtonally so that it ends up in Ab major, the final song’s new

key.  This is a surprising shift, as the final section of the song has the same

relative chord progression and melody as the earlier incarnation of “Two-Headed

Boy.”  This modulation reinforces a marked divide between the two versions.

It is almost

certain that Mangum actually plays the chords as if the song were in G, but

either tunes the guitar up a half-step or employs a capo on the first fret to

accomplish the modulation.  There are some chords in the song relying on open

strings that would be very difficult and awkward to play otherwise.  Further,

in the solo acoustic concert recorded March 7, 1997 and later released as Live

at Jittery Joe’s, Mangum plays parts one and two of “Two-Headed Boy” in the

same key.  Though his guitar is out of concert pitch throughout, judging from

the keys of other songs performed, they are both relatively in G major.  The

same goes for a bootlegged solo performance at Bottom of the Hill in San

Francisco, recorded April 12, 1998.  The reason for the transposition of the

album version is unclear.  The song could have been recorded after the saw

line, which happened to end on Ab, provoking the decision to perform the song

in that key for a smooth transition.  But it makes more sense that the

transposition was intentional.  The song reexamines much of the thematic

content of the album that preceded it, but rather than constituting a mere

retrospective, it advances a new perspective as the speaker emerges from his increasingly

introverted state irrevocably altered by his psychological torment.  Setting it

in the same key as songs earlier in the album would fail to reflect this new

emotional state accurately.

“Two-Headed Boy Pt.

Two,” though still fairly straightforward, features more chord changes than any

other song on the album.  The first verse begins with an Ab major-Gb major-F

minor progression, then moves into a section of I-V-IV, finishing with a ii-V-I

cadence.  The only accompaniment to the vocal melody is the gentle, steady

strumming of the acoustic guitar, establishing a moderate tempo in 3/4. 

Mangum’s voice strikes a sentimental, world-weary tone, fitting for a song that

seeks to bring closure to an exhausting psychological journey.  The plaintive

vocal melody breathes, first rising from middle C to Eb, then sighing down to

F.  Nearly the same figure is repeated in faster phases over the subsequent

I-V-IV progression.

The first verse

addresses a father who longs for a lover and a child, alluding to a son who

grew old, departed, or passed away.  Whatever the case, some essential quality

has been lost that he yearns to replenish.  The second verse seems to

reintroduce a couple of the album’s main characters:

Blister please with those wings in your spine

Love to be with a brother of mine

How he’d love to find your tongue in his teeth

In a struggle to find secret songs that you keep wrapped in boxes so tight

Sounding only at night as you sleep

Anne’s presence is indicated by a

reference to her appearance in “Ghost,” where she is depicted “with wings that

ringed around a socket right between her spine.”  The brother here resembles

the “dark brother” from the circus wheel in “Holland, 1945,” especially in

light of the suicidal references of the following verse.  Interestingly, he is

no longer “your dark brother,” but “a brother of mine,” subsumed into the

speaker’s identity as immediate family.  Alternate lyrics to the song from the

Jittery Joe’s performance replace the word “blister” with “sister,” indicating

Anne has undergone a similarly familial transformation.  In this conception, the speaker imagines

Anne and the brother as two of his siblings who each met death on quite

different terms.  Anne, despite her firm belief in life’s joy, has death

imposed upon her by an exterior agent.  Conversely, the brother has given up on

the prospect of earthly happiness, ending his own life in favor of the peaceful

bliss of death.  The speaker—feeling connected to each extreme by his own

blood—finds himself paralyzed, unable to decide which holds greater truth for

him.  The “secret songs” stored away that only play at night are likely a

reference to powerful, repressed emotions that surface in dreams.  These dreams

are explored in the subsequent bridge, the song’s—perhaps the entire

album’s—emotional centerpiece:

And in my dreams you’re alive

And you’re crying

As your mouth moves in mine

Soft and sweet

Rings of flowers round your eyes

And I love you for the rest of your life

Here over a I-ii-V-IV progression,

the weariness of Mangum’s voice shifts to a longing tone.  The melody

crescendos twice at the top of his range; first as the speaker relives his

imaginary embrace, his deepest longing realized for a fleeting moment, and

again as he yearns for this love to be satisfied eternally.  In his mind Anne

is still innocent and beautiful, the flowers in her eyes with which she was

born in “Holland, 1945″ preserved just as he had hoped.  Further establishing

connections to that song, alternate lyrics from the Jittery Joe’s performance

replace the words “for the rest of your life” with “nineteen-forty and five,”

invoking the year of her death, which, in his fantasy, no longer stands between

them.

The third verse

examines the brother’s suicide more closely:

Brother see we are one and the same

And you left with your head filled with flames

And you watched as your brains fell out through your teeth

Push the pieces in place

Make your smile sweet to see

Don’t you take this away

I’m still wanting my face on your cheek

In his grief, the speaker merges

himself with the brother just as he did with Anne’s spirit in “Ghost.”  The

flames and the disturbingly harsh reference to the aftermath of an apparent

self-inflicted bullet wound suggest that the brother died in a state of

anguish.  Kim Cooper (2005) says that here, “…[T]he living who love [the

brother] seek to undo the destruction and put him back together” (p. 76). 

Blurring the distinction between his love for the brother and for Anne, his

language is strikingly similar to Anne’s own description of her longing for

Peter Schiff her first love, as she alludes to a particularly moving dream she

had, which stays with her through her last months in hiding:

I saw my face in the mirror, and it

looked so different.  My eyes were clear and deep, my cheeks were rosy, which

they hadn’t been in weeks, my mouth was much softer.  I looked happy, and yet

there was something so sad in my expression that the smile immediately faded

from my lips.  I’m not happy, since I know Petel’s

name="_ftnref9" title="">^[9]

not thinking of me, and yet I can still feel his beautiful eyes gazing at me

and his cool, soft cheek against mine… I love you, with a love so great that it

simply couldn’t keep growing inside my heart, but had to leap out and reveal

itself in all its magnitude. (Frank, 1997, pp. 163-164)

Just a few sentences later, she

writes:

This morning I imagined I was in the front attic

with Petel, sitting on the floor by the windows, and after talking for a while,

we both began to cry.  Moments later I felt his mouth and his wonderful cheek!

(Frank, 1997, p. 164)

Anne’s entry and Mangum’s lyrics

are so similar as to rule out coincidence.  They share numerous key words in

common—”crying”/”cry,” “mouth,” “soft,” “smile,” and “cheek,” among others—and

depict very similar forms of catharsis, imagining the temporary satisfaction of

longing seemingly beyond realization.  The remarkable similarities suggest that

Mangum gave special consideration to this particular entry— consciously or

not—in writing his lyrics for these sections.  Anne’s implicit presence in the

speaker’s description of the brother confuses the boundaries between their

identities; as the speaker tries to reassemble the pieces of the brother’s

smile, he may also be attempting to restore the smile that faded from Anne’s

lips as she longed for her lost lover.  Complicating matters further, the

speaker’s longing is so similar to Anne’s—literally based on it—that it is

further evidence of the fusing of their identities in his mind.  While the

brother and Anne are the speaker’s siblings, he identifies so strongly with

them that he is able to merge himself spiritually with each of them.

For the penultimate

section, the chords are limited to I, IV, and V—the album’s fundamental

building blocks—as the speaker uses spirituality to transcend his turmoil: “And

when we break we’ll wait for our miracle / God is a place where some holy

spectacle lies.”  Unable to choose whether Anne or the brother better describes

whether life is worth living, he finds solace in their shared fate: an eternal,

sacred joy.

Finally, the theme from

the first “Two-Headed Boy” is reprised, its melody and chord progression intact

but integrated into part two’s transposed key and 3/4 time signature, the

latter of which is alluded to in the last lullabic verse of part one.  The

words are sung in the same low octave of that section, with a similarly

comforting intent:

Two-headed boy she is all you could need

She will feed you tomatoes and radio wires

And retire to sheets safe and clean

But don’t hate her when she gets up to leave

As the “Two-Headed Boy” theme is

reprised in the context of the rest of the song, it suddenly becomes clear who

the two-headed boy is, at least in part two: the speaker himself.  Torn by two

polarities—the example of Anne who yearned for life, and that of the brother

who sought death—he nonetheless has merged himself with each; part of him

desires to live on and experience life’s pleasures, while his other half wants

to surrender to the peace of death.  In this final stanza, Anne seems to make

one last appearance.  The two-headed boy in part one was building a magic radio

for his lover, and perhaps the radio wires she gives to the two-headed boy here

resemble some form of emotional sustenance that she provides to the speaker

through her diary.  Maybe Anne “gets up to leave” by dying, being unable to

complete her diary, or failing to truly manifest herself before the speaker as

he had hoped.  In any case, she can no longer sustain the speaker with her nourishment,

can no longer contribute to the construction of the speaker’s magic radio. 

This gives the radio an elevated significance.  The influence of Anne Frank

fuels the album, just as the two-headed boy’s lover contributes to his magic

radio, which he plans to present to her as a gift; perhaps the songs themselves

are Mangum’s own transcendent offering to the beauty that remains in

misfortune.

style='font-size:24.0pt;line-height:150%'>5

 

Time has been kind

to Aeroplane‘s reception.  Initially received warmly among alternative

media and indie rock circles, the album’s status has only grown as the years

have revealed the extent of its influence.  The increasingly prominent online

indie rock review magazine, Pitchfork Media (1999), placed the album at

#85 on its list of the top 100 albums of the 1990s, compiled a year after Aeroplane‘s

release.  Just four years later, however, Pitchfork (2003) revised its

list and the album soared up to the top five.  Similarly, upon Aeroplane‘s

release, MAGNET magazine (2003) published a fairly positive review, but

by the time it had formed its list of the top 60 albums of 1993-2003, it

awarded the album the number one spot.  Even mainstream sources, initially put

off by the album’s unconventionality, have joined in extolling its merit.  Rolling

Stone first issued the album a lukewarm three-star review (Ratliff, 1998),

but several years later the magazine was recognizing it as “a truly great

record” (Bracket, 2004, p. 578).  Jim DeRogatis (2003), frequent contributor to

SPIN magazine, calls it “one of the most strikingly original psychedelic

rock albums ever” (p. 542).

But years before it

could enjoy its canonization, Neutral Milk Hotel had all but disbanded. 

According to his close friends, Jeff Mangum slowly lost his passion for the

band under the pressures of its growing success.  His former girlfriend (and

zanzithophonist), Laura Carter, clarifies:

He didn’t want to take the music to a true,

professional level—like what Nirvana did.  And it was amazing up to the very

end!  Never losing intensity.  But I think that was the fear.  He wanted to go

out at its peak and not ride the peak until it fades and then burns out. 

(Cooper, 2005)

Ever since the final official

Neutral Milk Hotel appearance on New Year’s Eve of 1998, Mangum has kept a very

low profile, refusing all but a handful of interviews.  Though he has appeared

sporadically in concert and on record backing up his Elephant 6 friends in

bands like Circulatory System and Elf Power, he has not released any new music

of his own.

But despite its

fleeting tenure, Neutral Milk Hotel has become an indelible reference point for

indie rock.  Countless now-established artists claim to have been influenced by

the band.  Since Mangum has retreated into silence, it is looking less and less

likely that there will ever be another Neutral Milk Hotel album.  But in many

ways Aeroplane is a fitting final statement.  Uncorrupted by anything to

follow, the music is frozen at peak intensity, and it goes on and on.

Bachner, Gavin.  2004.  “The Carrot

Flower Kingdom.”  Retrieved April 2, 2007.

Brackett, Nathan, ed.  2004.  The

New Rolling Stone Album Guide. New York: Fireside.

Carioli, Carly. 1998. “Neutral Milk

Hotel’s epic ‘Aeroplane’.” Boston Phoenix, March 9. 

Retrieved February 16, 2007.

Cooper, Kim. 2005. In the

Aeroplane Over the Sea. New York: The Continuum International

Publishing Group Inc.

Cost, Jud.  1998.

href="http://neutralmilkhotel.net/magnet2.html">“Through the

Looking Glass.” MAGNET, 34.  Retrieved March 24, 2007.

DeRogatis, Jim. 2003. Turn on

Your Mind. Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard.

Frank, Anne. 1997. The Diary of

a Young Girl: the Definitive Edition, edited by Otto H. Frank and

Mirjam Pressler. New York: Bantam Books.

Griffis, Kevin. 2003.

href="http://weeklywire.com/ww/03-09-98/boston_music_2.html">“Have You

Seen Jeff Mangum?” Creative Loafing, September 4.  Retrieved

January 12, 2007.

McGonigal, Mike.  1998.  “Dropping

in at the Neutral Milk Hotel.”  Puncture.  41:19, 21-22, 55-56.

Ratliff, Ben. 1998. “Neutral Milk

Hotel: In the Aeroplane over the Sea.“  Rolling Stone: 781.

href="http://www.magnetmagazine.com/archives/top6.html">“Top 60 Albums 1993-2003.” 2003. MAGNET,

60.  Retrieved March 27, 2007.

href="http://web.archive.org/web/20010616215501/http:/pitchforkmedia.com/top/90s">“Top 100 Albums of the 1990s.” 

1999.  Pitchfork Media.  Retrieved April 2, 2007.

“Top 100 Albums of the 1990s.” 

2003. Pitchfork Media. Retrieved April 2, 2007.

Walser, Robert. 1993. “Beyond the

Vocals.” Pp. 26-56 in Running with the Devil.  Wesleyan

University Press: Hanover, CT.

XFM Radio.  1998.  Interview with

Jeff Mangum.  Retrieved March 13, 2007 (

href="http://www.elephant6.net/mp3/nmh/nmh_XFM_01.mp3">MP3).

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If you missed the earlier installments, read Pts. One and Two and Pt. Three now.

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