Little Birds (studio version) — Neutral Milk Hotel
I cannot believe what I just found.
Oh, my, lord.
Sexuality In The Work Of Jeff Mangum
Found this on my google travels, thought it was interesting.
There is a singular magic in the lyrical work of Jeff Mangum, the central force of the now-defunct band Neutral Milk Hotel. The songs are lovely in their odd and overflowing musical arrangements — the work of the band’s other members, Jeremy Barnes, Julian Koster, Scott Spillane, and often others, including Laura Carter and Robert Schneider — and in Mangum’s haunting, phantasmic lines. The most striking quality of the words is their complete harmonizing of the grotesque and the beautiful, the winsome and the profane. Mangum is showing us the terrible and the splendid in the same glance, a world that is fallen, ruined, and full of pain — and overwhelmingly beautiful, anyway.
This is most apparent in Mangum’s many complex, conflicted references to sexuality. Throughout On Avery Island, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, and various live recordings, Mangum’s mentions of sex are both tender and disturbing. He has found something beautiful in the more fraught encounters, and something revolting in the more mundane ones. The allusions to sex convey both disgust and desire, and both pain and joy.
