Neutral Milk Hotel - Holland, 1945
BACKSTORY!
when i was in high school i started listening to NWA and Public Enemy and Ice Cube and old rap because my friends were all we’re going to be huge pussies and listen to Dashboard and Bright Eyes and cry and talk about our feelings. this was before i had feelings. so as they drifted away from me because i didn’t obsessively talk about music and my emotions and just wanted to enjoy life and be awesome i learned to shun music they liked because to me it was all “faggy bullshit.”
and now i’m realizing that some stuff that they liked, like Neutral Milk Hotel, were fucking awesome. this song is my new favorite song of the week and i’m pissed my prejudice kept me from listening to it for so long. thank you andrew jackson jihad and btmi! for covering this song and making me realize how fucking good it is.
I had a similiar trajectory with this song. After closing out high school with Bright Eyes etc., I started digging into a lot of hardcore (probably attracted to the paralells in terms of intensity without the whining) and it was around this time I was introduced to NMH, which basically struck me as even less intersting than Bright Eyes or Dashboard because I couldn’t tell if Mangum “meant it” or was just playing up some exhaustingly fey bullshit persona with more of a pretese of feeling behind it than actual feeling. Anyhow, I basically slept on it for a few years and eventually gave “Aeoplane” a spin again (I’m 70% sure it was girl motivated, 30% sure I read something cool about it) and this was the song that stuck with me. Most of it was the rambling density, something that’s a pretty good common denominator as far as the art I like, but the thing is that it also serves as a rubric for the whole record. All the details and thematic threads that get worked out elsewhere are being spit out here and that’s the big thing that keeps me coming back. It’s 3 minutes or whatever, but it has moments where it feels like it contains lifetimes.
I honestly don’t remember the first time I heard In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. I remember the first time someone remarked on my listening to it, which was when I was a junior in college. The remark was generally ecstatic.
This is by far the easiest song on the album for me to sing. And my favorite to. It’s also got one of the better endings, the line about white roses, which parallales a Nazi resistance group. It does sort of serve as a rubric for the album, or I’d say that it works almost like a fractal representation. Or… well there must be a rhetorical term that means the same thing, but honestly it’s too hot to look it up right now.
I don’t ‘get’ people who don’t ‘get’ this album. Further, I don’t really think that a person knows anything about anything if this isn’t his favorite album of all-time.
