THINQon : In the Aeroplane over the Sea

Music Room Non-classical music In the Aeroplane over the Sea

THINQon is a platform for a more intelligent web. It aims to replace the ruling paradigm of the web – that of sharing and gathering information – with a sharing and achieving of understanding. Instead of the Q&A model it offers an experience. A platform for discovery of ideas, people, and yourself. Continue >

Robin Layter, I qualify as a youth. I have long hair and it...

In the Aeroplane over the Sea

Latest Post: July 4, 2009 at 10:33 AM

21 followers

I thought lyricism was dead until I heard this album by Neutral Milk Hotel around a year ago. It hit me like few albums do, particularly contemporary ones. The album was released in 1998 and is the lyrical child of Jeff Mangum. It was Neutral Milk Hotel's second and last album and its mangum opus if you will.

Mangum was inspired to create In the Aeroplane over the Sea after reading The Diary of Anne Frank. But it is not a retelling, nor is it a narrative. It falls in the murky waters between a concept album and a deeply personal one. The songs are abstract and surreal and rooted inside the mind and body of a child. Every feeling, thought, emotion that emerges from Mangum's words are first funnelled through the physicality of childhood.

Though the album revolves conceptually around Anne Frank's life, the words and music exist somewhere out of time and space. Mangum's intent with the album is to take a peak at the spectrum of human existence from one end to the other. Listening to the album you'll realize it is more than a compilation of songs, it is an entire event, it's as if you are living an entire life (Anne's and Mangum's) by going from one end to the other. It's absolutely beautiful and the lyrics are constantly reaching to do more. You can hear raw emotion in Mangum's voice that plays so wonderfully with the unique music behind him. The arrangements and instruments are every bit as surprising and varying as the lyrics. There are accordians and banjos, horns and organs.

In the Aeroplane over the Sea is one of those albums that you can go back to and take something new every time. It is filled with so many crystals of human understanding, each time you listen you see it sparkle from a different angle.

I wonder what about it is about this album, or art in general even, that can convince us so spectacularly and overwhelmingly of our own humanity. There is nothing in this album that I can pick out that speaks to me personally really, if you've heard it or listen to it ever you'll quickly realize how all the images are so specific to Jeff Mangum's life. But maybe in fusing his life with Anne Frank's he somehow transcends either one of their existences and reaches a plane where both of them, in fact everyone, lives side by side. A dimension that bridges time and space between everyone who's ever lived and ever will.

As I love quoting I'll leave you with this and a sincere recommendation, from Holland, 1945:

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
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

Music Discussed

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Reply to:

Hanna Clapson, I am an English major. I write and think. I...

June 30, 2009 at 10:39 PM

22 followers

The first song I really "heard" was Hallelujah, Jeff Buckley's version.

For one reason or another everything about the song directly struck me, the lyrics, the guitar, and the voice. At the time it felt almost spiritual. I was sitting on my bed in the dark with the big kind of headphones on my head completely enveloped in the song. It was the middle of the night, that time when all sounds seem foreign in the silence. I was looking out the window at the church across the street, all alone in white stone, the steeple reaching for the moon. This was long after Jeff Buckley died but it felt as if he was in the room, in front of the church, in the air, his face in the moon. For the length of the song I was removed from time and space, completely at the will of the rise and fall of a ghost voice. After the song ended, right after Buckley held "hallelujah" for what seemed like eternity, I realized I'd been holding my breath just as long. It was minutes before the goosebumps on my neck went away. The whole time I stared at the stone cross steeple and imagined Jeff Buckley sitting there, staring right back at me.

The song doesn't mean any one thing for me. On its exterior it is of love, and faith, and sex. That's what you can hear in the lyrics. But what made this song magical was the life Buckley put into it. In his voice you can hear his spiritual labor. You can hear him reaching with his voice to a higher plane. I'm not at all religious, an atheist even, but in the song's climax, that long 25 second "hallelujah," I can hear words and meaning fall from his voice; I can hear Jeff Buckley ascend to the seat of heaven, even if only for those brief seconds.

What is it about certain songs that appeal to us then? Is it a coincidence that the album you mentioned and this song are about birth as well as death? It's in music like this that we hear life, but more than that we feel our own pulse beating under our skin.

And it's not a cry that you hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen in the light
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah

This post is referenced by the following other contributors:

Annie Hemm

in "Overlapping Mediums in art creation"

(Library)

Reply to: or

Jeremy Stone

June 30, 2009 at 11:48 PM

26 followers

Thanks Hanna, I hadn't heard Jeff Buckley's version before now, though I guess it's quite well-known.

I also found that among the many, many other covers of this song, there's an unusual one by Bob Dylan, full of the standard cover-tune clichés. I think these are the same as the clichés of live rock performance: they rely on the expectation that listeners will hear the original tune and range of expression at the same time as what's being sung.

Jeff Buckley's version is a little theatrical for my taste -- or, at least, the video that I just watched on YouTube is. But I don't have a predisposition to feel any particular emotion toward the singer, whom for some reason I've never really listened to. And what I want to note is this: the original Leonard Cohen song is also pretty maudlin, but this doesn't diminish its effect for me any more than the video does (presumably) for Jeff Buckley's listeners.

Theodor Adorno wrote that Wagner had created a musical technique that was separable from truth content. Roughly, I think, the idea was that the Nazis didn't even really have to appropriate Wagner; even aside from his anti-semitism, his music was available to any content you cared to give it. The grandiosity and "triumphal bourgeois intoxication" that Adorno found in Wagner isn't really too far from the appeal of "Hallelujah," and I think it's important to see that Cohen gives us our religious intoxication while leaving the religion optional -- and it does the same thing in its coyness about sex and even religious disillusion. I won't say that it doesn't continue to appeal to me, or even that it's not somehow intelligent about its subject -- but when it winds up in the soundtrack of Shrek, it's probably fulfilling its destiny.

Here are two quite different Cohen recordings, for comparison. The first is a "secular" version:

The "religious" version can't be embedded here, so this is a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttv5dyvtF4o

And here's a link to an amusing BBC News Magazine article about the song, with comments on Cohen's multiple versions and two audio clips of interviews with him: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7787355.stm

Reply to: or

Annie Hemm, Hi! I'm unemployed and all the happier for it!...

July 1, 2009 at 7:02 PM

5 followers

"his music was available to any content you cared to give it."

I think you're right Jeremy. It's songs that are left open to the listener's imagination and his or her own interpretation that reach us the most. And isn't this true of all the best art? Aren't our favorites the ones that appeal to multiple senses, memories, and feelings? Ones that hide a million meanings?

And I think there is truth in what you say Hanna about the omnipresence of both life and death in some of the most affecting songs. One of the first lyricists I fell in love was Nick Drake. Ever since I first heard him I have never been able to separate his music from his story, from his death and from his ghost. His music is beautifully haunting. It's as if he lives and dies inside each song.

The song Fruit Tree is particularly eerie. In it he predicts his posthumous fame, but really it sounds as if he wrote it when he was already dead, when he was already a ghost. And it too is a song about birth and death. As Nick Drake rests in his grave somewhere in England, the Fruit Tree he planted during his life, in his music, grows upwards towards eternity and the seeds of his existence spread.

Fruit tree, fruit tree
No-one knows you but the rain and the air.
Don't you worry
They'll stand and stare when you're gone.

Fruit tree, fruit tree
Open your eyes to another year.
They'll all know
That you were here when you're gone.