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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 6582c9ab2b8e0d46 • Your IP : 188.246.226.140 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Cannonball Read III: In The Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper. If any of you have talked to me for more than 10 minutes in the last year or read any of my Facebook updates, you know I have become obsessed about a certain indie rock band and their certain album. For those of you not in the know, I have become a budding drooling hipster over Neutral Milk Hotel, a former Indie Rock band from Athens, Georgia. This book, written by pop culture writer, Kim Cooper, who has edited Scram — a journal of unpopular culture—and co-edited two books, Lost in the Grooves and Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth . Ms. Cooper’s task here is to chronicle the sudden rise and fall of Neutral Milk Hotel, indie rock legends. If you are not familiar with the band, the book sets up the tone for what would become such a holy grail to their fans. Jeff Mangum, the lead singer/songwriter, has become the JD Sallinger of the movement, only making brief appearances since disappearing into hiding soon after the end of the tour for In The Aeroplane Over the Sea . His shying away from publicity has kept fans salivating for more and passing the album on to new cult followers. This book pretty much shows how that came to be. The book reminds me a lot of the album in that it’s hard to explain everything in the book without reading it yourself and listening to the music it showcases. The best parts are the most raw ones describing how Aeroplane came to be, as well as, loose interpretations of the songs. It provides an outlet for a fan base starving for more music from Mr. Mangum—which given that he is set to perform at All Tomorrow’s Parties this fall in Asbury Park and supposedly might tour—they will be getting that music. To understand Jeff Mangum is hard, but his actions make sense. He bared his soul on the album, and in the book, Ms. Cooper’s interviews with the band and the fans really show that. He just didn’t know how to deal with his rising fame so he walked away. Ms. Cooper makes an interesting point that he did something Kurt Cobain probably would have wanted to. The music has reached countless people and has been cited by various musicians as inspiration. The book might be short but it completely tells the story. I give the book an A but the album an A+. For more of Alyson McManus’ reviews, check out her blog, Reviews In Rewind. This review is part of Cannonball Read III. For more information, click here. Sean VanSickel. I'm a writer. Essays, shorter fiction, longer fiction, and music. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Reading Log: Kim Cooper’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (a 33⅓ book) Kim Cooper’s 33⅓ entry on Neutral Milk Hotel’s magnum opus In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a good read for fans of the album, the band, or the alternative music scene in Georgia during the 90’s but it probably holds little interest for anyone else. Cooper isn’t writing for people outside the fold; the book assumes a working knowledge of Jeff Mangum, his friends, and their work. Casual references are made to bands like Great lakes, Olivia Tremor Control, and Of Montreal, with their lineups occasionally mentioned absent any introduction or framework for understanding. If you’re not already at least somewhat familiar with the subject, a Wikipedia survey might not be amiss. The back of the book describes it as “a lovingly researched oral history of the Neutral Milk Hotel and the Elephant 6 collective”. The research is evident; Cooper seems to have made every effort to talk to as many disparate people as possible, peppering the text with long excerpts from band members and other involved parties. The choice to focus on the entire span of NMH existence serves the book well, and while her fact-checking seems to be especially thorough, but the presentation as “oral history” felt a bit clunky. It’s written in a loose past tense, with far too much self aggrandizing regarding the telling of the tale. Late in the third act Cooper abandons the form entirely to give us her personal interpretation of the meaning found within the tracklist of the album, a jarring and unnecessary break from the narrative that reads something like a good undgrad newspaper’s review of the LP. Why do we read? Many of my friends read for practical edification; they consume long non-fiction tomes about economics, history, pop culture or technology. They read to learn something new or deepen their knowledge of something dear to them. If you are that kind of reader, (at least some of the time, like I am) and if you are interested in the subject, go ahead. The book is well-written, and the problems I’ve outlined above are more than manageable. If not, I’d look for a book in this series that touches on an album closer to your heart. While Darnielle’s Master of Reality is for anybody willing to pick it up, Cooper’s entry on In The Aeroplane Over the Sea is one for the fans. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The fans of Neutral Milk Hotel are insatiably hungry. For more music, for unreleased demo tapes, for a reunion tour. And for the band’s history. Their album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, which has in recent years dominated the critics’ lists of best albums from the end of the century, was released from seemingly out of nowhere, for most fans, in 1997. By the end of 1998, the band had broken up, long before the album had a chance to disseminate by word of mouth, and before its aural delights filled the ears of so many fans to whom this album means so much. The album barely had time to register before the band dispersed, and yet Aeroplane has only gained esteem in its brief life. Kim Cooper’s new book on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea , the first to chronicle the album and the band’s past, traces the band’s development from central figure Jeff Mangum’s childhood to its ultimate disintegration. It fills in the gaps, offering conversations with band members while tying together the sprawling story, and should take the edge off the appetites, at least for a while. When Jeff Mangum left Neutral Milk Hotel and the public realm of music in 1998, his retreat spawned a fascination that’s only grown since. Mangum was the creative force behind the band as the main songwriter, with fragments of songs circling his mind for years before he recorded them. Until now, the only way to piece together the band’s story has been to sift through the fan sites, the message boards, and the smattering of interviews, profiles, and articles available online. Most were written while the band was still together, with a trickling stream of gems appearing afterward. Mangum’s appearances post-Neutral Milk Hotel have been brief and scattered: a tenure of nine shows as a DJ on the New York freeform radio station WFMU, a lengthy interview on Pitchfork in 2002, and a disc of Bulgarian folk music recorded with Josh McKay and released by Orange Twin. Since then the well has been fairly dry. To give you an idea of the excitement generated by Mangum, even in the briefest of appearances: At the Olivia Tremor Control show last summer at the Bowery Ballroom, when the crowd recognized the voice of Mangum, whose face was shadowed by a baseball cap as he descended to the stage from the wings, a heated cheer filled the club. And only hours after he joined the band for two songs, his appearance made online news headlines at Pitchfork , Spin , and Billboard . It’s as if Mangum’s spiritual presence in his music has heightened the awareness of his physical absence. Perhaps that explains why Cooper’s volume on the band and its music has sold faster than any of the other books in Continuum’s 33 1/3 series. Released at the end of November, it has already entered its second printing, and has outsold books on both David Bowie’s Low and Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. But unlike Low and Born in the U.S.A. , albums that do not lack for documentation, and whose creators are still very much making music and performing in public, Aeroplane is virgin territory. Kim Cooper’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea pulls the band’s itinerant history together, and in doing so delves deeply into Jeff Mangum’s musical development.

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