The reissue of Neutral Milk Hotel's cult classic offers another opportunity to measure its reach and influence. Jeff Mangum's masterpiece mixes hushed folk, explosive brass, and unforgettable vocals that touch on pain, loss, memory, and hope.
So, then, seven years later Domino reissues In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the arguments can begin anew. I’ve talked about this album with a lot of people, including Pitchfork readers and music writers, and while it is loved in the indie world like few others, a small but still significant number despise it. Aeroplane doesn’t have the near-consensus of top-shelf 90s rock artifacts like, say, Loveless, OK Computer, or Slanted and Enchanted. These records are varied, of course, different in many ways. But in one key respect Aeroplane stands apart: This album is not cool.
七年之后，Domino再版了《In the Aeroplane Over the Sea》，于是，关于它的讨论又可以重新开始了。我曾经与许多人聊过这张专辑，其中包括Pitchfork的读者和音乐人，虽然它在独立音乐界得到了鲜有专辑可以比拟的广泛喜爱与认同，但仍有一小部分人并不喜欢它，数量不多，但很重要。《Aeroplane》并没有像《Loveless》、《OK Computer》或者《Slanted and Enchanted》这样的九十年代摇滚神专一样得到一致好评，上面这些神专都各有各的好，但是《Aeroplane》在一个很关键的方面和它们都不一样：它并不酷。
Shortly after the release of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Puncture magazine had a cover story on Neutral Milk Hotel. In it Mangum told of the influence on the record of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. He explained that shortly after releasing On Avery Island he read the book for the first time, and found himself completely overwhelmed with sadness and grief. Back in 1998 this admission made my jaw drop. What the hell? A guy in a rock band saying he was emotionally devastated by a book everyone else in America read for a middle-school assignment? I felt embarrassed for him at first, but then, the more I thought about it and the more I heard the record, I was awed. Mangum’s honesty on this point, translated directly to his music, turned out to be a source of great power.
在这张专辑发行后不久，《Puncture》杂志刊登了一期有关中性牛奶酒店的封面故事。在文章中，Mangum讲述了《安妮日记》这本书对这张专辑的影响。他解释道，在发行《On Avery Island》后不久，他头一次读了这本书，发现自己被难过与悲伤淹没，难以自拔。当我在1998年看到这篇文章时，他的自白让我瞠目结舌。搞什么鬼？一个玩摇滚搞乐队的人说他被美国中学必读书目弄得情绪崩溃？起初，我替他感到十分尴尬，但后来，我思考的越多，这张专辑听的越多，就越发佩服他。Mangum的诚挚感情，成为了他音乐创作上的强大源泉，并且毫无保留地传达到了他的音乐中。
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a personal album but not in the way you expect. It’s not biography. It’s a record of images, associations, and threads; no single word describes it so well as the beautiful and overused “kaleidoscope.” It has the cracked logic of a dream, beginning with “King of Carrot Flowers Part 1”. The easiest song on the record to like on first listen, it quietly introduces the listener to the to the album’s world, Mangum singing in a muted voice closer to where he left off with the more restrained On Avery Island (through most of Aeroplane he sounds like he’s running out of time and struggling to get everything said). The first four words are so important: “When you were young…” Like every perceptive artist trafficking in memory, Mangum knows dark surrealism to be the language of childhood. At a certain age the leap from kitchen utensils jammed into dad’s shoulder to feet encircled by holy rattlesnakes is nothing. A cock of the head; a squint, maybe.
《In the Aeroplane Over the Sea》是一张私人化的专辑，但它不是你想的那种私人化。它不是一本传记，而是一张由画面、联想和思绪组成的专辑，我们只能用“万花筒”这样美丽而又有点烂俗的名词来描绘它。它有一种如梦境般破碎的逻辑，从《King of Carrot Flowers Part 1》——这张专辑里最悦耳的歌——开始，它将听众悄悄地引入到了专辑的世界中，Mangum暗淡的唱腔，更接近他于《On Avery Island》这张节制的专辑那样（在这张专辑的大部分时候，他听起来都好像时日无多，要竭力去交代完所有事情）。开始的几个字是如此重要：“当你还年轻的时候……”， 像每一个贩卖记忆的敏锐艺术家一样，Mangum知道如何用黑暗的超现实主义语言去刻画童年， 对儿童来说，即使是从餐具刺进爸爸的肩膀到神圣响尾蛇包围双脚这般跳跃的场景，也并没有什么稀奇的，不过就是转个脑袋，瞥一眼的程度吧。
Inside this dream it all begins in the body. Moments of trauma, joy, shame– here they’re all experienced first as physical sensation. A flash of awkward intimacy is recalled as “now how I remember you/ how I would push my fingers through your mouth/ to make those muscles move.” Sometimes I hear this line and chuckle. I think of Steve Martin in The Jerk , licking Bernadette Peters’ entire face as a sign of affection. Mangum here reflects the age when biological drives outpace the knowledge of what to do with them, a time you’re seeing sex in everything (“semen stains the mountaintops”) or that sex can be awkward and unintentionally painful (“fingers in the notches of your spine” is not what one usually hopes for in the dark). Obsessed as it is with the textures of the flesh and the physical self as an emotional antenna, listening to Aeroplane sometimes seems to involve more than just your ears.
在这个梦里，一切都始于身体。在这里，那些创伤、快乐、羞耻的时刻都首先以肉体感觉的形式为我们所体验。一段尴尬的亲密关系被回忆为：“现在我能记起/我是如何把手指伸进你的嘴里/去挑弄那些肌肉”，有时候我听到这句就会发笑。我会想到在电影《大笨蛋》里，史蒂夫·马丁为表示爱慕，去舔伯纳黛特·彼得斯的整张脸。Mangum在这里展现了生物冲动超前于生理知识的那个年纪，处于那个年纪的时候，你在任何地方都能看到性暗示（“精液玷污了山顶”），与此同时，性又是尴尬和无意识的痛苦的（“手指伸进脊髓的缝中”可不是人们在黑暗中想要的）。肉体的质感和用作情感交互的肉身，它们共存于这张令人着迷的专辑中，因此欣赏它的时候用到的可能不只是双耳。
Then there’s the record’s disorienting relationship to time. The instrumentation seems plucked randomly from different years in the 20th century: singing saws, Salvation Army horn arrangements, banjo, accordion, pipes. Lyrical references to technology are hard to fix. Anne Frank’s lifespan from 1929 to 1945 is perhaps the record’s historical center, but the perspective jumps back and forth over centuries, with images and figures sucked from their own age and squirted out somewhere else. When “The King of Carrot Flowers Part 3” mentions “a synthetic flying machine” our minds leap to something like Leonardo da Vinci’s 15th Century drawings of his helicopter prototype. The image in “Two-Headed Boy” of a mutant child trapped in a jar of formaldehyde is pulled from Dr. Moreau’s industrial age island. The radio play powered by pre-electric pulleys and weights, the nuclear holocaust in the title track. What’s it all about? Mangum offers an explanation for these jarring leaps in a line about Anne Frank in “Oh Comely,” where he sings, “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.” If you can move through time, see, nothing ever really dies.
还有一点是，这张专辑的时间顺序混乱不堪。专辑中用到的乐器就像是从二十世纪的不同年代中随意抽出来的，有：锯琴、救世军军号、班卓琴、手风琴、风笛。歌词中提到的科技更是难以定位。安妮·弗兰克生于1929年，于1945年去世，这段时间可能就是专辑的历史中心，但专辑的视角在几个世纪间来回跳跃，画面和人物从它们自己的时代被吸走，又被喷射到另一个时代。当《The King of Carrot Flowers Part 3》提到“合成飞行器”时，我们会想到达芬奇在15世纪创作的飞行器原型图。《Two-Headed Boy》中，那个被困在福尔马林罐中的变异儿童的形象又仿佛来自于《拦截魔人岛》。还有前电力时代的滑轮和砝码所驱动的收音机，专辑同名曲中的原子弹大屠杀。这些意象都是想要表达些什么？《Oh Comely》中有句歌词是关于安妮·弗兰克的，在这里Mangum对这些不和谐的跳跃意象做出了解释，他唱到：“我知道他们把她和别人一同埋葬了/还有她的姐姐、她的妈妈，和其他五百个家庭/五十年后她还会记得我吗/我多希望我能坐着时光机去救下她”。 看吧，如果你能在时光中穿梭，就没有什么会真正死去。
Seven years it’s been, and whether Mangum has had personal trouble or somehow lost his way with music, it’s not unreasonable to think that we’ve heard the last from Neutral Milk Hotel. I hope he does, but he may never pick up the guitar he set down after “Two-Headed Boy Part Two.” Even so, we have this album and another very good one, and that to me is serious riches. Amazing to think how it started, how at the core of it all was guts. I keep thinking of “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding,” and one of Dylan’s truest lines: “If my thought-dreams could be seen/ They’d probably put my head in a guillotine.” Aeroplane is what happens when you have that knowledge and still take the risk.
七年过去了，无论Mangum是遇到了生活上的困难，还是在音乐事业上迷失了方向，这张专辑很可能就是牛奶中性旅馆的绝唱了。尽管我不希望这样，但他很可能不会再次拿起他在《Two-Headed Boy Part Two》结尾放下的吉他了。即便如此，我们还拥有这张专辑，以及另一张也很不错的专辑，这对我来说就已经是一笔宝贵的财富了。一想到这张专辑是如何开始的，它的核心又是何等的真挚，就令我感到叹服。我总是会想到鲍勃·迪伦的那首《It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding》，其中有他最为真诚的歌词之一：“如果我苦苦思索的梦想一旦被看穿/他们可能会将我推上断头台”。《Aeroplane》就是你已认识到这点，却仍然选择冒险之后，所得到的东西。
自从今年年初听了这张专辑之后，它已经荣登我这辈子最喜欢的专辑之一，出于对这张专辑的喜爱，用非常蹩脚的文笔翻译了Pitchfork对这张专辑的乐评。对我来说，越洋飞机就如同真心为你，创作者以最痛苦的方式，不遗余力地去探寻自己内心的最深处，将自己心中的一切苦难、纠结、快乐、创伤、希望以独属于自己的手法彻彻底底地表达出来，这样把心刨开的创作方法无疑能带来最为真挚的作品，却又是对自己的一种惩罚和折磨，也就无怪乎痞子在真心为你后陷入重度抑郁，Jeff Mangum也放下音乐事业沉寂多年。如果说真心为你是痞子的私电影，越洋飞机就是Mangum的私音乐，通过它，我能看到Mangum烈日之下曝晒的心。
