Flesh-Licking Ladies: Jeff Mangum in Concert
We give our love to the music that fits into the narrative of our lives. As a ninth grader, lost in that particularly charmless way many 15 year olds are, I worked as a slave labourer for Wonderland. The daily three hour round trip commute took me through a dreary expanse of midtown-turned-suburbia, the riders around me dead-eyed and merging with the scenery. I do not know how I would have made it through that job if I did not have Neutral Milk Hotel (introduced to me by a certain “mainstream indie” music website) playing on repeat in the hazy summer mornings and idle summer nights that surrounded my working day.
What drew me to Neutral Milk Hotel initially was its music – its brass was celebratory, its instrumentation carnivalesque, its melodies immediate. But even in my adolescence, I was a student more of language than of sound. Jeff Mangum—the band’s vocalist and lyricist—gave the band their limitless appeal. My first encounter with In An Aeroplane Under the Sea revealed a Mangum who declared outright: “I love you, Jesus Christ”; who filled his surrealist reveries with images of holy rattlesnakes and semen-stained mountaintops; whose paeans to two-headed boys mirrored the circus-punk of the music. Upon my second listening, I noticed that Mangum’s spirituality became enmeshed with a fear—or, perhaps, an eagerness to express discomfort—toward lust and sexuality. Oblique references to sex, most pronounced in lines such as: “placing fingers through the notches in your spine”, resonated in me; I was only beginning to discover my own body, and the flesh of others remained a darkened stain in the realm of my imagination. To be enthralled by this music, and the wound it created in me between a private conception of God and a public conception of love, gave my curious existence a direction.
In the Aeroplane over the Sea is famously a “concept” album detailing Mangum’s imaginary relationship to Anne Frank, a relationship deeply touched by the horrors of the Holocaust and the lucidity of Frank’s prose. (To me, Mangum’s declaration that she “was the only girl [he had] ever loved” signifies his homosexuality. Surely, said my warped logic, he must then have loved many more boys?) His lyrics, at once both esoteric and universal, were a huge part of his rise to indie stardom. But the man who “would shoot all the superheroes from your skies” deflected his fame and superstar status from the start and went into a reclusive ten-year period where he interacted very little with the musical community and did not tour at all.
You could almost hear a collective exclamation of “Holy f-#*&!” from the Neutral Milk Hotel fan-base when Mangum decided to tour again. In the ten-plus years since Aeroplane’s release, Neutral Milk Hotel has impacted Arcade Fire, Brand New, and the Dresden Dolls (among many others) —all of whom have matched the band’s success, but, in my opinion, never its purity. To have the opportunity to see Jeff Mangum for two nights in a row (in the acoustically-unmatched Trinity-St. Paul’s Church, no less) was, for me, a way to revisit the intensity of my first encounter with the band—and the raw, possessed sincerity of its undeniable lead singer.
Trinity-St Paul’s was sweltering both nights of Mangum’s performance. During the hour-long opening set, the heat was quite apparent. But as soon as Mangum came onstage--long-limbed and smiling from cheek to cheek, the heat seemed to dissolve—it became part, rather than outside of, the experience. And if his set sent me into ecstasy the first night, the repeat viewing was transcendent, veering close to ego-death: a total loss of awareness of the self. I will always share an affinity with the quality of Mangum’s music. It documents a love that stretches to the point near the end of the world, that decries flesh as feeble and mind as contingent; it is a spiritual music which, on those two nights, made all thoughts of church and religion banal beyond belief to me. As a romantic idealist growing up in a family and culture of rational atheism, I was unfamiliar with any metaphysical conviction that lay outside the bounds of churchly institutions. The music of Neutral Milk Hotel had kindled my fascination with the existential experience many years ago (“How strange it is to be anything at all!”) and, on those two nights, it was that music that gave me release from doing nothing more than living and being.
The physical fact of the performance raised other interesting questions about dichotomies. Most notably: between the audience and the musician—when Mangum asked for all of us to “f--n’ sing” , and we instead responded with reverent silence, did he blur the line at all? The dichotomy between the fan and the hero—did Mangum take up this tour to “demythologize” himself, to take himself down from the pedestal he had been placed on in the history of indie rock? Lastly, the dichotomy between how fans envisioned the performance and how it actually turned out comes to mind—I had been dreaming of the concert sporadically for weeks already. But Mangum’s music is the type that resists all attempts to be intellectualized--to filter it through a pane of the mental. It is the kind that plunges in and cannot be extricated; it defies heart-on-sleeve and instead fulfills a more grandiose, heart-in-chest ambition. It is a music which has only grown within me since its inception in my consciousness five years ago, and it brings me a joy outside of time which never fails to send tremors down the notches of my spine.
Written by Fan Wu
