Eternal Ghost: Neutral Milk Hotel, Anne Frank, and the Loss of Youth

Since I haven’t been able to see any movies for a good deal of time, I decided I would write a critical analysis of one of the landmark albums in the indie-rock canon, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. In some ways analysis of this work seems even cliche, since it was created as something that was both embracing and endlessly interpretable. Nevertheless, I felt like writing something having recently read Anne Frank’s diary for the first time, and being a long time NMH fan. Here’s my interpretation, as seen through it’s fundamental unspoken symbol: Anne Frank.

And so you can listen along or whatnot, I’ve made a youtube playlist of all the songs on the album in proper order here: http://www.youtube.com/user/feedbackinhibition#grid/user/CF9B8AFD50493183
If you’ve never heard the album before I highly recommend listening to it as/before you read this.

Neutral Milk Hotel is one of the most mythical musical groups of the late 20th century. This can primarily be contributed to their short existence as a recording artist, releasing only two albums before disbanding. By the time they vanished from the world they had left behind the much cherished gem On Avery Island that plays like a somber and reflective ode to life through a mystical island in the sky, and a transcendent masterpiece called In The Aeroplane Over the Sea that would create a sustained buzz among musicians for years to follow. This work was introspective and self contained as an artistic message, but applied to emotion common to everyone. It was this album that would later be lauded as the fourth greatest album of the 1990’s (whatever the hell that means) by trendsetter Pitchfork Magazine, and the work that has ensured their immortality for countless years to come.

Their sound is singular among indie-rock circles of the late 90’s, and the contemporary lo-fi folk aesthetic seems to have been practically built around them. They sound like a funeral marching band on drugs, with heavy acoustic strumming that’s been around since Dylan in the 60’s, but with horns and fuzz as emotional counterweights that lift lead singer/songwriter Jeff Mangum’s voice through the clouds and into the celestial ether.

Jeff Mangum

Mangum’s lyrics are cryptic yet noticeably profound, even if you can’t quite figure out what the hell he’s trying to say. This lends the music the ability to fit anyone’s personal interpretation without seeming arbitrary, which is often seen as the hallmark of great art. It’s almost common knowledge, however, that Jeff Mangumhad an almost unhealthy obsession with Anne Frank while writing ITAOTS. For those who somehow were unaware, Anne Frank was the teenage girl living in a secret annex in her Amsterdam home with her family, while hiding from the Nazis during World War 2, who wrote about her experiences frequently in her diary. She was eventually captured two months before the liberation of Holland and died in a concentration camp of Typhus two weeks before that camp’s liberation. Her diary became an international best seller after the war and became standard reading for school children, although I believe it’s actually much better appreciated by an adult. Her voice is candid and enthusiastic, innocent and perceptive, making it easy to grow fond of her (as Mangumsurely did). Reading her diary now is one of the more affecting instances of dramatic irony; we see her mature as she ages and we see her relationships develop in much the same way as anyone’s does, and then it ends, as we know it will. It leaves a lasting impression of universal humanity that became a figurehead for the Holocaust remembrance of the decades after the war.

Anne Frank

The music within the album seems to sculpt a particularly universal and poignant message when analyzed within the Anne Frank framework. Mangum reflects on his own obsession with the dead Frank, while never explicitly mentioning her name, in a way that speaks to the truths that the emotion itself reveals. It’s not an “aw man the holocaust sucked” album, or even an album about Anne Frank; Anne Frank is simply the unspoken symbol used to convey Mangum’s reflection on the awkwardness of Youth in an adult world and the precious time it is which ends before we know it. By attaching Frank’s memory to it, his emotions have a physical manifestation that evoke an entirely new set of connotations to further express his own personal and occasionally overwhelming feelings. In her diary Frank reveals many of the same emotions that Mangumexpresses, but Mangum’s pain is of a different nature (since after all he wasn’t trapped in an attic for three years). This seems to both enhance the transcendence of Frank’s story as well as establish his own. His lyrics seem to be almost like his personal diary, containing concentrated and furious letters to himself in response to his incessant dreams of the girl. The emotions within apply to almost everyone, regardless of generation. Those with the memory of youth, the memory of Anne Frank, of the holocaust, of their own awkward past or their own personal story appreciate ITAOTS as a manifestation of these often untapped wells of emotion. I’ll now analyze the album sequentially, as each song acts to reflect and build upon this universal theme.

The album begins with the acoustic strumming of King of Carrot Flowers, a reflective message to a long lost lover written in the direct second person. After reading Frank’s diary I immediately drew a connection between the narrator of the album and Anne’s friend Peter who lived with her family in the secret annex and eventually fell in love with her. Mangum’s Peter persona seems to meld with his own, the Frank past with his personal past. Mangum sings of quarreling here, which was typical among the adults in Frank’s cramped quarters and was the source of much anxiety for her. He then sings:

“And this is the room One afternoon I knew I could love you
And from above you how I sank into your soul
Into that secret place where no one dares to go”

which fits perfectly with Anne’s reflection in her Diary. Peter lived mostly in the attic on the floor above Anne, as Mangumpeers down onto her from the future, from above, perhaps reading her writing. The “place where no one dares to go” regards Frank’s “real personality” which she describes at the end of her story as the Anne that people don’t know, with the exception of Peter whom she falls in love with. This is the good Anne, the real Anne that is only reflected when she writes in her diary. Peter’s love was cut short by their capture, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it, just as many young romances often are (albeit this one ends in a far more terrible manner). Some of the most emotional portions of Frank’s diary concern her budding romance with Peter, and this is conveyed well by NMH; the song is reflective upon the past with a sense of tragic longing, but never regret, as if Peter is looking on from the Heavens at the life he once had.

Part 1 of The King of Carrot Flowers segues into part 2 and 3 which see the full addition of NMH as a backing band to the wail of “I love you Jesus Christ” and a bass heavy organ that feels more as though Mangum is simply adding emphasis to his undying love for Anne’s spirit (as in “Jesus Christ that was deep”) than as if he were calling out to the God who could have saved the Franks from their ghastly demise. This bleeds into an electric guitar fuzz-thrash of catharsis, a pounding of the walls with the fists of unfortunate acknowledgment, as Mangumpants in a fever dream about the ethereal ghost world he longs for. He then wakes up and the next song begins.
In the Aeroplane Over The Sea the song returns to sanity with one of the album’s more haunting melodies. It’s an affecting love song, which is probably why it’s one of NMH’s most popular moments, although it’s sung to a ghost, a memory in a dream that “flashes on the screen in a blink of an eye” and disappears as he awakes, in much the same way Frank flashed upon the screen of life before being erased from it. Mangum’s airplane flies over the eternal sea of time (could this be heaven, anyone?) with the ashes of the one he loved. NMH’s eerie whistle behind his piercing voice only add to the otherworldly quality of the surreal lyrics from this song of longing. It’s beautiful, tragic, caressing, and aware of the unusual dream that existence often is.

Then begins Two-Headed Boy, one of the tracks without any backing band. An intimate and personal song sung out to the wind. The two headed boy himself appears to be Mangum, stuck between the present he lives and the past he fantasizes about, both his personal past and Anne’s, his own head and Peter’s. He utilizes his own story in a way that plays off the emotion from Anne’s, although the details seem to be entirely his own; he interjects tender moments from close experiences in his own life as he “placed fingers in the notches of your spine,” etc. Mangum sings to his own intimacy in a way that exudes the loving emotion that can be seen in Frank’s diary. This fades into The Fool, which is entirely instrumental and plays like a funeral march through the streets of Mangum’s mind. The love he had is gone, his past is gone, the innocence of the youth he sings about is gone, leaving only memory in much the same way that Anne’s existence is but a memory for him, albeit a close and personal memory. In some ways it’s as if the ghost of Peter looks upon Anne’s funeral procession in the next world.

The tempo then shifts to the most blatant use of the Frank symbolism, Holland, 1945, a raucous lo-fi rock stomp that concentrates Mangum’s emotion and unleashes the building tension of the previous songs. Here the fire and enthusiasm comes through with ease as he sings with anguish:

The only girl I 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
came down and rained on everyone

The imagery here is at its most palpable, conjuring scenes of Nazi mass graves and vegetation growing on the skulls of the dead. The sister he’s referring to in this passage is Margot Frank, Anne’s older sister, who died a few days before Anne in the same camp, and whose body was also buried in the same mass grave. Mangum appears to even be insinuating that fate played a role in Anne’s death, which could be expected from his dreams bleeding into reality to the point where her death becomes expected, as it does when reading her Diary. He is no longer ashamed of his self consuming obsession here; his love is too powerful that he admits that there was no other one he loved in the way he loved this ghost, the concept itself of the first real love of one’s life, the one which is often the most intense and keenly remembered. Anne was beginning to realize this near the end of her story through Peter, and Mangum recognizes this in his own obsession.
The attitude is becoming more optimistic and celebratory here, as love is certainly something to celebrate; he even sings of having to “pick up every piece / of the life we used to love / just to keep ourselves enough to carry on.” He is shifting his attitude as if it’s the natural thing to do, as if to move on guided by the strength of this love that once was. Then we begin to see that Mangum is probably referring to the afterlife as the source of his optimism:

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

The stellar imagery conjures this great pervading ether that Mangum seems to evoke many times; a place that’s bigger than humanity on earth, a feeling that’s more real than reality. The line “The Earth looks better from a star / that’s right above from where you are” is perhaps the most memorable line of the whole album, acknowledging the immense power of Anne’s ghost and youth in general as if he can finally look down upon life from the next world as the dead would, yet with the light of the star providing a source of optimism in the darkness of space. Mangum’s outro is equally poignant:

And here’s where your mother sleeps
And here is the room where your brothers were born
Indentions in the sheets
Where there bodies once moved but don’t move anymore
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

He ponders on the negative space left by those he held dear in his dreams and reflects on the sadness of a humankind that would harm what he holds so dear rather than cherish that love. It’s as if he is preferring the next life to the current one, and he’s filled with a great comfort to know that he will one day be able to fulfill that dream. Mangum’s mood is now hopeful, if tragic, but the high will soon wear off. His skill as an abstract wordsmith is in full form here, creating penetrating and symbolic verse that both fits the emotional mood of the song and the greater message(s) that run beneath.

The house "where their bodies once moved but don't move any more"

If Holland, 1945 was the party, the celebration of a surreal affection, then Communist Daughter is the calm period right after the storm of lovemaking. It’s a dramatic shift in tone to an acoustic memory of the younger age that was alive and new. His wording is still within a dream state; the protagonist is standing in the ocean of a surreal landscape and “semen stains the mountaintops” of his quiet and tormented mind, lost in a mix of memory from both Mangum’s life and the tragic but youthfully beautiful world in his mind. The entire song is like a reflective ode to making love for the first time, associating objects in the scenic landscape with the act itself. The underlying emotion carries over from before and his personal romantic experience is mixing with his longing for the youth that got away.  As the song ends it feels as if Mangum is landing from his trip over the sea of the eternal with his beloved ghost and then reality hits him with the next song.

Oh Comely feels like the most personal song on the album, clocking in at over eight minutes, it’s the second track to feature only acoustic guitar. He is aware now of the reality that means that the past is indeed gone and there is nothing he can do about it. Mangum is bitter now about the past that got away rife with anger against his personal rival (“Standing next to me / he’s only my enemy / I’ll crush him with everything I own”), that which took the youth away from him, both literally in Anne’s death, and figuratively as a symbol of the thrill that comes with the innocence he once had. His personal history more noticeably comes through here as he describes the body of a past lover who lived in a trailer park, clearly not in Amsterdam. This lover he describes without any touch of sensitivity as he would Anne:

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

He appears to be revealing to the listener the reasons for his turning towards the innocent and pure emotion as seen in the Diary, since the real life he’s lived has not given him any chance to have that which he feels youth could have given him. His pitch rises as he seems to slightly attack this lover for what she’s caused with him. He then shifts back to his dream with Anne

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 are enemies are

This seems to conjure the fate concept again; just as Anne could do nothing to help herself from being captured, he cannot do anything to prevent it. No matter how hard he tries he cannot retrieve the youth he had, he cannot get his dream back into any sort of real world, it can only exist in his mind as a memory. At least he is aware of this limitation, he is beginning to accept the unreality of his love and the unreality of the unobtainable.

Anne Frank

Nevertheless, he will always embrace this other, pure, innocent world. It may not be real but it is preferable to reality. The dream is something he wants so he may as well live it. In Ghost the entire band returns as he calls out to his ghost Anne to retrieve his mind back to the ideal unreality. NMH grinds in and shouts his plea to his ethereal guardian and one “true” love. In doing so he resurrects the flight theme:

Ghost, ghost i know you live within me feel as
you fly in thunderclouds above the city into one
…
and she was born in a bottle-rocket 1929 with
wings that ringed around a socket right between
her spine all drenched in milk in holy water
pouring from the sky i know that she will live
forever she won’t ever die

The mounting noise and thudding drum beat kick in and gets his spirit on its feet. He’s reflected on his own life and his dream and has chosen to side with the youth he had lost. Mangum then describes a girl falling from a 14 story building in New York City and her spirit rising into the sky, where she becomes immortal. He is embracing the inevitability of death, as a return to the things that can never be returned. The funeral marching band blasts away in the back celebrating his coming into the next world where his dreams can become real.

As it does, the penultimate Untitled track kicks in as an instrumental cosmic orgasm of funeral bagpipes welcoming his spirit into the higher plane, as the rocky drums push everything along with gusto and a heavenly chorus permeates the background to welcome him. Ironically this is ITAOTS’s most optimistic moment, yet the listener can feels nothing but grand euphoria at this reunion between the lost and the present. Alas this is only a glimpse into better things to come, a reason for never giving up in the chaos of the world, a reason to live your life in hope despite whatever evils may occur. There will always be a place beyond with the emotions he has lost. This fades with a haunting reverberation into Two Headed Boy Part II, the final track. Mangum’s voice painfully reflects on the entire journey from a new place among the dream world:

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 (when you’re ready)
He feels a final comfort in this new world that was with him all along:
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.

Anne specifically refers to the sheer youthful excitement of holding her face cheek to cheek with Peter in her diary, and Mangum is taking his position with Anne in the next world as Peter, as himself, as the two-headed boy longing to comfort her and her vulnerability through the rough divide between reality and the after life. He eventually has to release her in his ‘physical dream,’ letting her go since he has not in reality died yet:

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.

He will forever take comfort in knowing that she is there, that the innocence and youth he left behind is there in the next life waiting for him, even though he cannot get it back now. All he can do is symbolically send her off in his mind where she can wait. The finally lines of the album are as if Mangum is letting her hand go off into the ether from whence she came, although it is only a temporary and bittersweet removal:

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.

Mangum leaves it at that; he, the two headed boy has accepted that his surreal love is eternal and will take comfort through her from afar having acknowledged her and held her hand through the dream world into the next, where she waits for his day to come. The youth he once had may be gone forever, but it’s only a while until he can be reunited with it. Until then he can continue to draw strength from this mysterious and mystical relationship with the ghost of Anne Frank, and the innocent life she represents that has gotten away from him, whenever he contemplates his life and the sad state of the world. Her exuberant life cut-short acts as an emphasis and an impulse to Mangum’s personal longing for the awkward, but exhilarating days of yesteryear that now exist only in dream, when the quarrels of the adult world were nothing but quarrels and the only intense, real emotion was the love of another.

——-

I highly recommend that you listen to this album all the way through and ponder for yourself on its meaning. Mangum’s use of imagery and symbolism are pointed but broad to the point where it can be interpreted in a number of ways with equally profound results. The music and arrangement only further this poetry as a dirge through reality into the dream world where the past can return to bring comfort for all. Many great albums, even some of the best, do not even begin to breach the new depths of emotion and self reflective connotation that Neutral Milk Hotel consider in In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. It is an album that’s intensely personal, in the vein of Lennon’s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, etc., but with a veil of mystique unparallelled in much of modern music. It’s content, sound, attitude, and ambitions have since become very influential in independent music today, and In The Aeroplane Over the Sea, like Anne Frank and the themes evoked pass on into the eternal ether for the future to reflect upon.

After having read both Anne Frank’s diary and listened extensively to In The Aeroplane Over the Sea I discovered that youtube actually has the only moving film footage of Anne Frank. Seeing her move is strangely touching, showing that she was certainly a real being. Perhaps this speaks to the power that film as a medium has on us all..

* Now that I’ve written all that down I can finally stop thinking about it. God forbid I end up like Jeff Mangum..

Explore posts in the same categories: Features, Outstanding Albums

Tags: anne frank, in the aeroplane over the sea, neutral milk hotel

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