The best-selling title in Continuum's book-per-album (or was that the other way 'round?) 33 1/3 series is Kim Cooper's take on Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. This might not strike you as odd at first, until you get around to the other titles in the series: The Beatles' Let It Be, The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St., Radiohead's OK Computer, Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA, Nirvana's In Utero, The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, etc. So we are not just talking about a bunch of obscurities here, these are some of the best-selling classic albums by the biggest acts in rock 'n' roll history - records that have sold millions and millions of copies, the mere mention of which causes label execs (those that remain) to squirt a few tears for the good ol' days. According to the book (which I have not read - this factoid was cited in a review here), as of 2005 In the Aeroplane Over the Sea shifted a relatively meager 150,000 units since it was released in 1998; compare that to Merge stablemates the Arcade Fire, who moved 92,000 copies of their newest, Neon Bible, in its first week of release. Yet, in the pantheon of pantheons that is the 33 1/3 library, it is an obtuse contortion of lo-fi buzz and lyrical cryptology that never even pawed at the screen door, let alone scratched the surface of the mainstream, that is number one.
I can't begin to tell you why this record has the death-grip it does on some people's ears and imaginations. ItAOtS is hardly inviting at first listen: its ramshackle orchestrations, mastermind Jeff Mangum's piercingly nasal vocals, and the too-clever/strange-by-half wordplay...well, it can be like trying to swallow an entire watermelon at once. It's an album a not inconsiderable proportion of the public might consider as having been inflicted upon them rather than listened to. I myself had an intense allergic reaction to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, derisively referring to it as "Aeroplanes in My Cereal" and other such intentionally mis-remembered sobriquets.
It's now been ten years since In the Aeroplane Over the Sea came out; the only reason I recalled this was that Pitchfork - a publication that infamously expunged its original, insufficiently laudatory review of the record - is running a two-part series celebrating the anniversary. The album is a Rosetta stone of indie tastes - a last gasp at willful obscurantism in the pre-internet age, when you had to make an effort to seek out a record like this without the benefit of eight million blogs posting the same shitty-fi mp3s months in advance. Nowadays indie music's success is a combination of increased reach via the web combined with the mainstream bar plummeting due to the record industry's swan song. The marketplace is so bifurcated as to give the insulated music dork the appearance of having achieved a kind of hegemony, when in fact no one knows who M.I.A. is, or who James Murphy is, and Feist is that chick from the iPod commercials. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea reads like a missive from another dimension when Pitchfork is pumping out fey-pop icons like Sufjan Stevens - a Tommy Stone to Jeff Mangum's Brian Slade.
Mangum disappeared after this record arrived on store shelves. Well not literally, but apart from a collection of field recordings of Bulgarian folk musicians, he hasn't laid a note to wax or plastic since, a fact that has undoubtedly burnished both his and the record's legacy as a kind of misshapen masterpiece that hung a left off Art just before the intersection with Commerce. When he does turn up, as he did a couple years back at a concert by fellow Elephant 6ers (and disappearing act) Olivia Tremor Control, "Elvis is alive, well, and working at a gas station off of I-10 in Louisiana"-type stories pop up across the blogosphere. Will the disciple who once wailed "I love you Jesus Christ" at the 0:22 mark of "King of Carrot Flowers Part 2 & 3" break his unacknowledged vow of silence or recede into the ether once more?
In retrospect In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a sinking ship, overloaded with ambition, emotion, ideas, and sheer virtuosity. It is a bold, brilliant, beautiful album that I'll never get my arms all the way around, never understand the way that those people who really love it do. Sometimes that's the way it's meant to be, I guess. "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."
