Last week, new reservations came open at the Neutral Milk Hotel. The legendary and (sort-of) long-defunct 1990s indie band released a (sort-of) new three-and-a-half-hour box set, The Collected Works of Neutral Milk Hotel. It marks the 25th anniversary of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, the group’s second and final album. Within a year of its release, singer-songwriter Jeff Mangum withdrew indefinitely and unceremoniously from the music world (sort of).
Recent months have also seen the separate advents of a long-gestating book by Adam Clair and a documentary by C.B. Stockfleth about the Elephant 6 collective. That’s the agglomeration of 1990s indie artists and musicians from which Neutral Milk Hotel sprang, first in small-town Louisiana and, later, at the collective’s base mostly in Athens, Georgia. Associated bands included Olivia Tremor Control and Apples in Stereo, and, later, Of Montreal, among many even-lesser-known assemblies. Like author Kim Cooper’s 2005 Aeroplane entry in the 33⅓ series, the new book and film challenge the image of Mangum as lone visionary. They situate his work in a raucous social circulatory system of collaborative creation.
So, the time seems ripe to ask: After a quarter century, are fans finally ready to listen to Neutral Milk Hotel and Aeroplane as historical artifacts? Or even simply as music, rather than fetishizing (or despising) them as cultural totems?
Fan culture can be terrifying. Everyone should have known that from the famous footage of Beatlemania’s Dionysian frenzy, and countless other mass enthusiasms before and after it. Social media simply offers a wealth of new examples. Fandom can also be an engine of self-invention and social bonding, particularly for people who otherwise have trouble finding spaces where they will be heard. Those teeming, screaming 1960s streets full of Beatles-mad girls have been seen by feminist thinkers as harbingers of both the sexual revolution and women’s liberation. Today’s BTS stans and other K-pop enthusiasts have been known to band together for activist causes, and by their very existence, they push Western pop culture to open its borders to the rest of the planet.
Still, fan adulation harbors a violent ritual structure. It’s not just that “haters” as well as celebrity rivals become designated targets for mob attack. Fan idols themselves are symbolically sacrificed even as they are worshipped. Their privacy, humanity, and multidimensionality are ripped away to satisfy the needs of their congregants.
It’s at least partly out of a distaste for all that mass messiness that many people have turned to so-called underground or “indie” culture. But it’s deluded to imagine we’ve then escaped cleanly from the pernicious side of fandom. Tribalism easily mutates into snobbery, subgenre competition, and obscurer-than-thou one-upping. And as for that parasitic idolatry, Neutral Milk Hotel can tell you all about it.
Aeroplane was warmly but calmly received by the music press on arrival in 1998. But the mid-2000s saw the album’s poetically febrile, raggle-taggle folk-rock swaddled in layer after layer of legend and sentiment, in no small part due to the buzz around Mangum’s reputation as a hermit. Slate itself wasn’t immune: In 2008 we described Mangum as “the Salinger of indie rock.” Aeroplane rocketed up many retrospective best-of-the-’90s lists, becoming particularly a mascot for Pitchfork’s pre–Condé Nast heyday: The site compared it with The Waste Land and claimed that Mangum’s art “short-circuits all conventional modes of expression.” Bands such as Bright Eyes, early Arcade Fire, and many so-called freak folk artists drew on NMH’s oneiric antiquarian yarn spinning, its “Salvation Army Band gone awry” arrangements, and Mangum’s vocal yelps and yawps.
In the process, the album became a millennial identity marker, such that sitcom Parks and Recreation used it in 2011 to affirm the disaffected-hipster character of Aubrey Plaza’s April Ludgate. Not long after, on the album’s 15th anniversary, someone wrote an appreciation of Aeroplane in the Ludgate persona, which unfortunately reads less like satire than a dead-on impression of online NMH fan discourse:
[Aeroplane is] not made up of “songs.” It’s a bunch of weird, like, musical inspirations that flew down from outer space and lodged in Jeff Mangum’s skull and then he recorded them because if he hadn’t, they would’ve rattled around his brain forever and driven him insane. Which is way better than “songs.” After you listen to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, you are never the same. … And you will look around, and all the stupid people who have never heard it and had their lives changed forever will seem like primitive cavemen who don’t understand anything.
Meanwhile, though, Mangum was doing something a Salinger of indie rock is not supposed to do: coming back, in his own, partial and controlled way. This is the source of all the “sort ofs” in my opening paragraph. Mangum began making unannounced live and on-record appearances with Elephant 6 comrades in the later 2000s. In 2011 he began playing multiple solo shows. (I saw one with a nervously hushed crowd in a church in Toronto.) Then, from 2013 to 2015, he fully got the band back together. Neutral Milk Hotel played more than 160 shows, in 25 different countries and in all but nine U.S. states.
The new box set is also only a more widely available version (with digital sales and streaming) of a smaller, vinyl-only edition Mangum assembled for fans back then. It included an EP called Ferris Wheel on Fire that was recorded in 2010, featuring new acoustic studio versions of some of his best unreleased 1990s songs. Mangum still declined to do interviews, and there was only one song performed or released publicly that was composed post-Aeroplane (“Little Birds,” a song partly inspired by the gay-bashing murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998). But hundreds of live appearances before crowds of thousands is not exactly the behavior of a recluse.
Mangum has acknowledged more than once (onstage and in his one major interview, conducted by a friend and published in Pitchfork in 2002) that his initial dropping out coincided with a nervous breakdown. Outside of that period, though, he’s generally been reported to be living a contented and healthy private life. There are more choices than rock star or hermit.
One would think fans too young to have seen NMH’s extensive and anarchic club tours in the late 1990s would have been overjoyed to finally be given that chance, and in larger, more comfortable venues. Most were, but there was also a streak of bizarre unease that was captured in a piece by a writer named David Rice in Salon, who greeted Mangum’s return as nigh on an existential crisis.
Whoever or whatever authored the album feels as remote in time and space as the Big Bang … The fundamental mystery of Jeff Mangum himself … has never been separate from my identification with and custodianship of his artifact. Over the years, I’ve conjured him as both an ever-present astral guide and a total nonentity, some archaic force that was never a real person.
You see my point about the Ludgate parody. After he did attend an NMH show in Brooklyn, Rice added, “I left feeling lightened, like part of my personality was gone, and I wondered how much was left.”
Such reactions are of a piece with the kind of starry-eyed boundary transgressions Mangum coped with from fans circa 1998. People would travel great distances, bearing handmade gifts, and buttonhole him at length on the mystic portents of his lyrics in their lives. Phoebe Bridgers has called such fans punishers, and Mangum’s friends have often said that this punishment threw him way off balance.
The most notorious case of such misplaced attention came in 2003, when a writer in the Atlanta alternative weekly Creative Loafing published an article called “Have You Seen Jeff Mangum?” He frames the piece partially in relationship to his own brother’s suicide. After that, Aeroplane—which revolves around multiple themes that include Mangum’s urge to save or reclaim the spirit of Anne Frank in the face of an uncaring world—helped the writer find “mythological nourishment and a nudge toward hope that some piece of life doesn’t perish with the body.” Art can and should provide that kind of solace in dark times.
But then the writer continues: “So, of course, the one album wasn’t enough.” Deploying his reportorial skills, the writer begins circling Mangum like a shark, attempting to force him to the surface. He interviews other band members and friends and, at his most extreme, tracks down Mangum’s retired-professor dad in Louisiana, to grill him about Aeroplane’s lyrical allusions to violent conflict in the childhood home. At that provocation, Mangum at last emails the writer, bidding him to stop. The writer persists, until Mangum finally comes back begging: “Please,” the singer writes, “I’m not an idea. I am a person, who obviously wants to be left alone. … Since it’s my life and my story, I think I should have a little say as to when it’s told.” The writer’s response? “He’s wrong, of course.”
Not that I think artists should have veto rights over all public accounts and discussions of their lives and work. But that cry—“I’m not an idea. I am a person”—sums up the pathology and objectification to which fan idolatry is prone. Like many fans, the writer is unshakable in his conviction that the person who’s given him so much owes him more, either another album, or a full, self-disclosing explanation for why not.
Such NMH fan obsessiveness logically produces non-fan backlash, whether out of mere bewilderment and annoyance, or in posturing for cool points. Search “Neutral Milk Hotel sucks,” and you’ll find plenty of it. As the cycles of resentment and backlashes-to-the-backlash have sanded off the edges of the curve, alongside the satiating effect of the tours, Aeroplane has cruised gently down to a lower and more stable stratum in critics’ lists and fan polls.
I remain astonished and bemused by the whole two-decade arc. As a listener and writer roughly Mangum’s age, I’ve always heard Neutral Milk Hotel’s music as a product of its time and influences. Aeroplane is nothing more or less than a highly accomplished work within a category, not a sui generis miracle.
I don’t mean just the other Elephant 6 bands’ music here, but a couple of decades’ worth of preceding artists, from the “twee” C-86 bands of the U.K. in the 1980s to the “lo-fi” American cassette-makers of the 1990s (Mangum was a big Daniel Johnston fan), and in particular the groups on the Flying Nun label out of New Zealand (the subject of another recent book). Listen to 1981’s “Nothing’s Going to Happen” by the Tall Dwarfs, for example, and you’ll lose any illusion that Mangum’s style fell inexplicably from outer space. That song even includes the phrase “endless, endless,” the line from the Aeroplane liner notes that Clair uses as the title of his Elephant 6 book. It’s no coincidence that the only two full shows Mangum played during his decade-plus live hiatus were first a 2001 New Zealand club date alongside the Tall Dwarfs’ Chris Knox, and then a 2010 New York benefit after Knox suffered a stroke.
Some millennial fans may know a few of these references, but they’ve most often traced back to them after becoming converts. They didn’t hear Aeroplane in those frameworks to start with.
Some of the mythologizing is also due to when Aeroplane came out. It was the year before Napster launched in 1999. The cusp of the moment when the internet would transform both the music industry and fandom forever. In keeping with its throwback imagery and preoccupations, Aeroplane instantly became one of the last relics of a vanishing beforetime.
Mangum’s withdrawal, too, seems to me rooted in an underground aesthetic and independent ethos that would in many ways be rendered defunct by that imminent economic and cultural upheaval. The “alternative” boom and bust defined 1990s rock: Musicians saw their heroes’ and friends’ lives and careers sabotaged by false promises and exploitative music label deals. There were plenty of psychological casualties of that success mirage, with Kurt Cobain only the most famous. (I also think of Elliott Smith, whom Mangum sounds a lot like on his quieter early four-track recordings.) Many of that period’s acclaimed songwriters professed to be allergic to the concept of fame. Mangum just meant it. As he sings on “Ferris Wheel on Fire”: “Well, now first of all/ We became what we always had feared.” Artists, if you either have to quit or die, please just quit.
When I’m tempted to be generationally smug about the delirium of 21st-century NMH fans, though, it’s quashed after I consider some idols the Elephant 6 crowd and I had in common growing up: Brian Wilson, Syd Barrett, Nick Drake, Karen Dalton, Sly Stone, Arthur Lee, Alex Chilton, Peter Laughner, Skip Spence, father-son team Tim and Jeff Buckley … Allow us to corner you in our rec rooms. We idealized the supposed holy fools, lost geniuses, and outsider artists too pure to function in a fallen world.
As an adult, I contemplate how their friends and peers might regard our romanticization of their comrades who had breakdowns, overdosed, or killed themselves. Too often these artists, just as Mangum put it, became ideas, not people. Tragic events become accessories to our personalities and, at worst, parts of our entertainment. Suicides are not symbolic martyrdoms for strangers’ benefit. If you’ve lost anyone that way, you know how utterly, annihilatingly devoid of romance it is.
In 2023, dethroning the myth of the singular genius and destigmatizing mental illness have both become more mainstream concerns. Fresh cohorts of young fans may find ways not to stumble back into those well-worn grooves. Probably not, but maybe. I’m currently working on a book centered around David Berman, the poet and singer of the Silver Jews and Purple Mountains, a contemporary of Mangum’s and mine, who died by suicide in 2019. That Creative Loafing writer is always looming over my shoulder.
So I’ll decline to speculate whether the reissued box set is any kind of signal that Mangum might be considering some kind of return, whether more touring or new recordings. What I can say is that, listening through the catalog, I can see why continuing Neutral Milk Hotel as such might have come to seem an unsustainable pursuit. The vision realized on Aeroplane is, on every level, from lyrics to bristling and overdriven sonics, about the precariousness of youth and innocence, and its inevitable (though perhaps not total) extinguishing by cold reality. It’s a dizzyingly potent rendition of that theme, as psychosexual subconscious subject matter keeps bubbling up to twist and corrode the guy wires of naiveté. Nevertheless, that eternal-childhood motif can be self-limiting, as many subsequent indie romancers of anti-maturity would prove.
Mangum developed that work throughout his 20s, alone and with friends, and safeguarded his wide-eyed dreaminess much longer than most people. Aside from a handful of standout tracks, most of the earlier material, including first album On Avery Island, is spotty and embryonic. (Sorry, contrarians.) But after Aeroplane, I wonder if that road had dead-ended. “At some point, my rational mind started creeping in,” Mangum said in that solitary 2002 Pitchfork interview, “and it would not shut up. I finally had to address it and confront it.”
For a man in his early 50s, I doubt returning to the NMH mode could be rewarding. That doesn’t mean Mangum couldn’t find another, “late” voice. But it is easy to imagine the inhibiting effect of expectations there, noticing how mightily he and his companions strove to satisfy fans with faithful renditions of the catalog between 2013 and 2015.
After reading the Elephant 6 book and particularly watching the documentary, which bursts with personalities and candy-colored imagery, it’s that community above all that seems enviable in Mangum’s story (despite the pains and losses that later life has dealt the collective). Fame and wealth be damned, and his personal output or lack thereof be damned too: An immersion in the Elephant 6 universe could inspire anyone to refresh the relation between their social and creative lives. May their tribe increase and thrive. (The film is still touring festivals and hopefully will find wider distribution.)
I was also reminded this week of a tale about how artists might disrupt and reappropriate fan objectification, which just happens to center on NMH itself. The song “Naomi” from On Avery Island is about Naomi Yang, of the band Galaxie 500 and the duo Damon & Naomi. Mangum had never met her, but he sings in its unnervingly stalkerish opening lines, “Your prettiness is seeping through/ Out from the dress I took from you.” At the Terrastock festival in 1997 or 1998, NMH singing-saw player Julian Koster (lately known for his storytelling podcast The Orbiting Human Circus) gave Yang the record and tipped her off to the connection.
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“The lyrics seemed sweet but disquieting—a fan letter with a dark edge,” Yang later wrote. Years later, she “thought about taking back ownership of a fan’s infatuation,” and with permission, made her own video for Mangum’s song, in which she lip-synced it, thereby “inhabiting the very lyrics that had been written about me.” The clip also includes shots of some personal possessions and stage outfits, as well as one of The Diary of Anne Frank, “an object that references Jeff Mangum’s own fan idolatry.” Yang recently reissued the video, to coincide with the wide-release version of the box set, though she notes that, in the interim, “I have come to know all the band members as especially lovely people, and I am no longer at all unsettled by the song.”
The narrative of Mangum’s partial vanishing act can serve as a parable too—one for an era of profligate artist presence and fan excesses on social media. Art benefits from a modicum of mystique, by the concealment of the mirrors by which the magic is worked. Think of the year-after-year refusal of Frank Ocean to sate his own fans’ musical thirst, for instance, or of the U.K. collective Sault’s quiet determination to defend much of its membership’s anonymity. Even as mass-market and arguably conventional a star as Rihanna is aware of how keeping up an air of diffidence enhances her charisma. Through his extended silences, Mangum has led many of the curious to listen with a heightened closeness. The longer the hotel preserves its strict neutrality, the more the guests might grasp that they can’t get the milk for free.
