Whatever punk is, and it is more a spirit than anything else, it thrives in the cultural underground. It is a reaction to what seems fake, over-produced, slick, commercial, safe, middle-of-the-road, and passé. Punk constantly divides and turns against itself in a struggle to remain or become authentic. The music of the mid-70’s Stooges and the New York Dolls formed the seed from which later English and American punk grew. In those early days, the music was eclectic, open, amateur, raucous, and angry. The Ramones, probably the most important 70’s American punk band, could sound both angry and poppy, bouncy and desperate. And so we get “Blitzkrieg Bop” and “I Want to be Sedated.” Johnny Ramone, resisting the punk label, describes the essence of their sound as pared down rock and roll: rock without the parts they didn’t like, he comments in his autobiography. This kind of music emerges from everyday life. It embodies a do-it-yourself attitude, the hutzpah of amateurs who don’t know any better. Everything is focused on the song, the sound, the attitude, the expression. Punk returns to the inner soul of rock. And rock is just a particular form of folk music, not folk music as a genre, but folk music as a mode of everyday life. One of the surprising descendants of punk music as a folk music of everyday life is the strangely beautiful, often tonally ambiguous In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, by the Jeff Mangum led Neutral Milk Hotel (NMH).

Art of any kind relies on recurrent practices to create interest, to provoke emotional reactions, and to reveal the feel of life. It reminds us of what we can too often forget amidst our anxieties, habits, and distractions. I want to note one such practice that is central to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, but has an even more profound form in T.S. Eliot’s “Marina.” Eliot describes that poem as combining two recognition scenes. In a letter to the critic and scholar Wilson Knight, Eliot explains what he attempted in the poem: “I wanted a crisscross between Hercules waking up to find that he had slain his children, and Pericles waking up to find his child alive.”  The poem is an achingly and mysteriously beautiful confession of love (and religious longing), resonate with a quiet unfolding of crisscrossed images. This crisscrossing is central to literary art. Metaphors are built from such criss-crossing of two stories—when something (the first story) is described as another (a second story). Such metaphors rely on compression to integrate this crisscross within a single intensity of expression or experience. Similes and analogies diminish this compression and thus this intensity, but the criss-crossing logic is the same.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a music of crisscrossing. Each song is built from a particular kind of imaginative criss-crossing of words, scenes, metaphors, tones and tonal slippages. This criss-crossing takes place within songs and amongst them. This lyric crisscrossing, for example, dominates the song “Holland, 1945.” The singer sings about a long dead beloved (an echo of Anne Frank, whose story deeply affected Mangum):

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

This girl is immediately swept into new imaginings of her resurrection as a boy in Spain, who is “Playing pianos filled with flames / On empty rings around the sun.” These lines quickly modulate into the singer’s life:

All sing to say my dream has come
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

Rage becomes sadness as the song ends:

And it’s so sad to see the world agree
That they’d rather see their faces fill with flies
All when I’d want to keep white roses in their eyes

The lyrics crisscross worlds, times, and stories, the imagery never quite stabilizing in time or place, despite the title. The songs’ edgings of sense cross in tension with a melody played and sung at a frenetic, punk tempo. In other songs, like “Oh Comley,” shifts in the key, create moments of tonal slippage, which create further harmonic ambiguity, creating in the listener a visceral emotional response, or what Leonard Meyer calls in more academic language, when discussing folk music, an “affective aesthetic experience” (Emotion and Meaning in Music, p. 220).

In almost every song, the imagery is surreal and the stories ambiguous and cryptic. But repeatedly bursting through this imagery are brutally realistic events and circumstances: World War II, Anne Frank, trailer parks, despair, loneliness, rage, resentment, sex, death, and killing. The surrealism and brutal realism crisscross in such a way as to reveal the albums tonic center—a sense of emotional longing and care that is not pathetic, but earns its authenticity in the details of the stories and the integrity of the singing. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is an acidulous post-punk folk parable of love.