Review Summary: What happens when white people from Louisiana are allowed to make music: A cautionary tale
I’m a fun guy. I like fun stuff. I enjoy slashing ambulance tires and picketing abortion clinic picketers as much as the next guy. I don’t put quinoa in my salad. I routinely stick gum under the desks of small city officials. I crudely draw genitalia on school bus windows and throw pints of beer into the faces of midgets. And I like to think that <3 is a symbol for an ice cream cone filled with ass (otherwise known as the Beyoncé Special). Fun guy. Captain Fun.
But sometimes, fun can be taken too far. 1998 was a bad year for that. Lest we forget that in 1998, France won the World Cup, which took place……… in France. Coincidence? Yes. But that’s not all.
- Bill Clinton was nearly impeached for having a Polish woman massage his Netherlands.
- The orca from popular bestiality film Free Willy was released into the wild, all willy-nilly, dying almost instantly after learning that triple mocha lattes don’t naturally occur in the wild.
- Europe settled on a unified currency, making all my Danish flugelbagels obsolete and worthless.
- Big Tobacco was lawlessly robbed of their hard-earned dollars by wheezy people with yellow fingernails and bad breath.
- A massive ice storm caused rolling blackouts through Canada, causing millions of people to go – It’s dark, eh?
And most gravely – Neutral Milk Hotel released an album that launched other albums like the aforementioned album.
Neutral Milk Hotel was started by witty troubadour, thrift store shopaholic and human argyle sock Jeff Mangum, along with his beloved wife, Sophie Womangum, and his third cousin, Brian Mantooth. The album in question, despite its aero-name dealt with the trials and tribulations of Anne Frank, who is most known for her TV appearance on Martha Stewart’s ‘Spruce Up Your Attic on a Budget’ special.
The sound of Airplane over the Sea is seemingly casual and yet fraught with meaning. Like that gentle, fluttering sound a colostomy bag makes as it splatters onto the floor. And the ensuing silence, as auntie Mildred looks at you and her eyes whisper – I’ve got a bad back, would you mind picking this up for me?
Upon release, the album was a critical hit, unfairly outshining some of the year’s best music, like the Titanic soundtrack, Dave Matthews Band and Garth Brooks. It was found out much later that Mangum’s rise to success was due to him blackmailing Bill Board, chairman of the BillBoard Hot 100. Somehow, Mangum had deviously laid his hands on a fetish porno Board had starred in in his moneyless youth, and threatened to expose him. The porno was about people with severe headaches ***ing, and was called Men In Gitis. Talk about Hot 100. Upon hearing of the blackmail, Bill Board was quoted as saying: Ah ***!
In South Africa, the album was fortunately overshadowed by Oscar Pistorius releasing a collection of popular covers, including Elvis Presley’s Blue Suede Shoes, Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Were Made for Walking, Duane Eddy’s The Walker and Nelly’s Air Force 1’s.
Though some have mentioned that no one really needed some pre-modern hipster’s take on the savagery of Nazi Germany, the album actually deals with a wide range of topical topics, like genetic mutations in young males (Two-Headed Boy), Patrick Swayze (Ghost), Billy Corgan (The Fool), Al Qaeda (In the Airplane Over the Sea) and untitled (Untitled).
The album has also been commended for breaking the floodgates for hundreds of forcefully quirky grown children posing as musicians in their use of forcefully quirky instruments in recording – singing saws, Uilleann pipes, flugelhorns, euphoniums, white noise machines, bowed banjos and other such pointlessness that was previously only utilized by dark age people to sound off another black plague epidemic. Symbolical? You tell me.
To summate, do you know who else was once in the Airplane over the Sea? Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Otis Redding, Jim Croce and Patsy Cline. Maybe listen to that instead.
PS. In heavy metal news, Russia is erecting a statue to Ivan the Terrible.
