| Neutral Milk Hotel – In the Aeroplane Over the Sea Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| I don't know if "optimistic" is really how I'd describe the lyrics - haunting perhaps since the central metaphor of the song is of a dead girl who was exterminated by the Nazis. Her diary has become world famous since, even after enduring two years in hiding in Amsterdamn, even after members of her family were taken to Auschwitz, she still wrote of her belief in the basic goodness of mankind. The images of floating on clouds after death, laughing, having our ashes scattered from an "aeroplane" instead of an "airplane", make me think that he's talking about anachronistic thought - i.e. that the beauty of life is a mirage, nothing more than an adolescent imagining. By putting his fingers into the mouth of a young girl who is now a ghost, he forces her to speak soft and sweet - that is he gets her to say what he wants to hear, he controls her voice so that all of her horrific secrets can sleep in winter clothes, i.e. hibernate, be pushed to the back of their minds while they are happy and young. The song becomes atonal, it breaks down into nothing but sound and then suddenly we're back to the beginning stanza but the dream is over, it has flashed on the screen and is gone, but it was never there, it was only in his mind (on a "screen"), and you cannot hold onto a dream. It's as meaningless as floating on a cloud and laughing. Nothing in this song actually exists except the strange muscles of Anna's mouth and his fingers. We are "nothing at all." And it is all told under the guise of such sweet refrains, that is while we are alive we must believe in the beauty of life, we have to fool ourselves and let those images sleep in winter clothes. Or as Mr. S said, "We are the stuff that dreams are made of." Without those dreams we "aren't anything at all." | |
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