The album, which grows more fantastic with each play, is a concept album about--or greatly influenced by--the life and death of Anne Frank. What has really been haunting me about the record are the images evoked by the lyrics. They are at once beautiful, but also unashamedly sexual and raw, sometimes violent, and always pure in their emotion. And if you put Anne Frank's face on all the "you"s and "she"s in the lyrics (it may not have been the intent, but it's difficult not to do so), there is an added layer of creepiness--the sexualization of a young girl. Even further: the sexualization of a dead girl. One could even take it so far as pedophilia, and almost abstract rape, because the girl cannot defend herself or enjoin herself with any of the images Mangum evokes. But I'm still never offended by the lyrics, perhaps because the passion is unashamed, unassuming, and guiltless. I think "haunting" really is exactly the right adjective to describe this album.
Here are a few of my favorite snippets from the lyrics:
And your mom would stick a fork right into daddy's shoulder...
And your dad would throw the garbage all across the floor
As we would lay and learn what each other's bodies were for
Now how I remember you...
How I would push my fingers through
Your mouth to make those muscles move
Made for his lover who's floating and choking with her hands across her face...
And in the dark we will take off our clothes
And they'll be placing fingers through the notches in your spine
Semen stains the mountain tops...
Your father made fetuses...
With flesh licking ladies
The movements were beautiful...
All in your ovaries
All of them milking with green fleshy flowers
While powerful pistons were sugary sweet machines
Smelling of semen all under the garden
Was all you were needing when you still believed in me
But now we move to feel
For ourselves inside some stranger's stomach
Place your body here
Let your skin begin to blend itself with mine
...
Probably my favorite:
And here's where your mother sleeps...
And here is the room where your brothers were born
Indentions in the sheets
Where their bodies once moved but don't move anymore
And it's so sad to see the world agree
That they'd rather see their faces fill with flies
All when I'd want to keep white roses in their eyes
So I think I was inspired to create my own images that juxtapose beauty with both overt and covert sexuality, in addition to praising ownership and guiltlessness over own's own sexuality. I'm also interested in the fine line between girlhood and womanhood. Anne Frank is 15 years old in perpetuity--a girl. That, in part, is what makes some of the sexual imagery on Aeroplane uncomfortable. But at 15, a girl is going through puberty (if she has not already finished) and is beginning to explore her own sexuality. Certainly today, many girls have lost their virginity by age 15 or 16. This is true whether or not anyone wants to publicly acknowledge it.
One of the first images that came to me was a pair of bare knees and hands clasping or grabbing at a skirt in some sort of strong emotion--distress, or desire--pushing it upward. I don't know exactly where this image came from, but in my head, it represented a lot of the ideas I wanted to portray. Unable to get this image, or the ideas evoked by the music, out of my head, I took some photographs last night that I plan to use as studies for a series of paintings I want to do. I think some of them work really well as just photographs alone, but I don't identify myself as a photographer so I have difficulty seeing any of them as finished works of art. I'll probably still go on to paint them, and then decide which works better.
I used high contrast and harsh light to achieve a more interesting visual effect, but there are obvious symbolic subtexts as well. In the costuming, I chose ultra-feminine pieces of clothing--lacy, airy pieces in muted neutral colors. Some of the pieces remind me of 1940s clothing, which may be part of the reason I chose them. The interesting thing about some of the pieces were that, though they were dowdy in cut (button to the throat, full sleeve, cut past the knee, etc.) they were made of sheer fabric. If nothing is worn beneath, the nudity of the figure is exposed. I also chose to crop off the face/head/identifying features of the subject. This isn't for the purpose of objectification; rather, I want these pieces to be intensely personal. But I also want to demonstrate the universality of the feminine dilemma.
1 comment:
The words to "Holland, 1945" - especially the ones from the end, where you quoted - always make me choke up at least a little bit. That's some massively good stuff.
(Have you read the 33 1/3 book on Aeroplane? It's much more about the history of the album than an effort to interpret it, but it's a short read and worth it. I'd be happy to loan it to you if you haven't read it yet.)
I have this sort of odd pipe dream of gathering up a bunch of musicians with similar tastes (ha, yes) to do a performance of Aeroplane, in much the same way that Les Claypool's band covered the entire Animals album. No idea what kind of venue would be right for that (other than, yanno, some old abandoned church somewhere, in an ideal world).
It's a shame my friend Spyder isn't local; she's the one who got me hooked on this album, and I think modeling for a project inspired by it would be right up her alley. (Though she does live with a photographer...)
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