ABSTRACT
Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane over the Sea is a 1998 lo-fi album which oddly features Anne Frank. It was the band's second and last album, and Neutral Milk Hotel broke up shortly after the departure of Jeff Mangum, its psychologically tortured lead singer and writer. The guitar intro to "In the Aeroplane over the Sea" performs and projects its chords and rhythm much more strongly than the melody. Although David Rando deals only with the lyrics of Aeroplane and makes no attempt to engage with the music, he mounts a persuasive case for considering the album—an imaginative recollection of the Holocaust's most celebrated victim—in the context of Post-memory Theory. The ultimate aim is to explore how post-memory and music analysis might illuminate each other in the service of a blended historical-musical experience. Post-memory considers the impact of history upon people who were born too late to have direct recollection of its events.
