In sound, the album is a circus: punk gives way to folk, which dissolves into a sonic mess and congeals back into rock ‘n roll. Slowed down, the title track’s simple GCDG chord progression could well be reinterpreted as doo-wop. At the core of the album’s instrumentation one can surely pinpoint a rock band, but these elements are wholly enmeshed in a melee of organ, banjo, saws, assorted white noise makers, and a Salvation Army Christmas band horn section, all of which warble collectively from frenzy to dirge. Time and again, the arrangement dissipates and we find ourselves with only Mangum’s voice, rough and raw if not unpretty, alone save for a guitar and a four-track recorder.
The album sets its scene in an American landscape replete with broken families, surreptitious couplings and, presumably, the sorts of winged phonographs one finds aloft over an industrial cityscape on the back of the liner notes and as printed on the CD itself. Its tone is part Chitty Chitty Bang Bang surrealism and part Walker Evans photojournalism, at once jubilantly surreal and brutally ethnographic. As is true of our own world, the world where the album takes place is one of intense wonder and horror. Going on a decade ago I tried to graph the incidence of the album’s recurring tropes. A partial list of that effort reads as follows: death, trailer trash, suicide, I-thou love, domestic violence, incest, the miraculous, music, ghosts, sex, nature, destruction, eyes, mouths, Jesus Christ, abandonment, fetuses, birth, third-person love, shared hatred, carnivals, life as seen from the outside, semen and other bodily discharges, nostalgia, myself, flesh, sister, angels, wings, spines, faces, dreams and speakers.
As a fragment in the genealogy of spirituality, special attention is due to the recurring theme of the two-headed boy. Unmasked on the album’s fourth track as an undead laboratory curiosity, the two-headed boy is the exception that proves the existential rule that, as Aristophanes dubiously reports it in the Symposium, we are, each of us, the divided half of a broken human union. It is the myth that has inspired a thousand movies, a million pop songs and, at one time or another, everyone I know. Aeroplane’s version of this myth goes like this: before we are born, when we are in utero with our unborn twins, we are whole. After we are dead, when we meet on a cloud and laugh out loud with everyone we see, we are together again. In between, for the duration that we are thrown into the world, we fumble toward one another like adolescent lovers who have not yet mastered their body parts. Not always, however, is our differentiation unbridgeable. By making beautiful things—love, children, music—we may find fullness even as we live, united with one another and with God.
Yes, believe it or not: God. Bursting forth from an atmosphere of unformed reverb between the album’s first and second tracks, Mangum’s plaintive voice offers the most unanticipated praise:
I love you Jesus Christ
Jesus Christ I love you,
Yes I do
The voice repeats what it recognizes to be a truly shocking declaration. Whatever can this mean? In the unbroken block of prose of the liner notes, where the lyrics at times yield to second order reflection, an explanation is proffered.
…and now a song for jesus christ and since this seems to confuse people I’d like to simply say that I mean what I sing although the theme of endless endless on this album is not based on any religion but more on the belief that all things seem to contain a white light within them that I see as eternal…
A disavowal in no sense, to an audience that can only assume he must be joking, Mangum makes clear that as crazy at it may sound, he means what he says. And yet, as he translates for the godless, his love is meant without a shred of exclusivity. Not based in any one religion, Jesus Christ here is a metonymy for the endless endless, the seemingly eternal white light that animates all things. Mangum’s God is one that even a secularist can abide, just so long as she knows what it’s like to be a body in a state of unwilled differentiation. In the album’s penultimate stanza, where the two-headed boy bids sad farewell to his soon to be broken-off half, just as Mangum, himself, prepares to say goodbye to the beloved that he will soon bequeath to us, the listeners, this God is further fleshed out:
And when we break we’ll wait for our miracle
God is a place where some holy spectacle lies
And when we break we’ll wait for our miracle
God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life
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