What Are We Gonna Do With All This Trash?: This Can't Happen

March 31, 2009

This Can't Happen

Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea might be my favorite record ever, so it sincerely pained me when I read the news, via Pitchfork, that the lady from the Dressden Dolls is helping to make a high school musical based on the album. Fuck!

I’ve always disliked that population of indie or underground music fans that get pissed when their small, beloved bands find a larger audience, but this isn’t that sort of sneering hipster-ism. I’m just pissed that a great piece of art is getting bastardized and regurgitated by people who claim to love that piece of art.

Really? You love that record? You love it so much that you want to make terrible carbon copies of it, like the hundreds of fucking awful covers on YouTube? You love it so much, you want to re-contextualize it to make it fit into your high school musical about the Holocaust? What the fuck?!

I don’t listen to Amanda Palmer or her “cabaret punk” band, and she may very well have the best intentions. But this is an awful idea. Doesn’t anyone remember Across the Universe, the movie musical based on the Beatles? I love the Beatles, and the movie boasted a bunch of talented, hard-working professionals working on it, but it was a beautifully decorated, well-staged piece of shit. What do you think a high school drama club is going to do to the work of Jeff Mangum? It’s all too terrible to imagine.

I implore Ms. Palmer to reconsider this idea. You know what would be better? Anything. How about a coming-of-age love story set to Double Nickles on the Dime? How about a dystopic future sci-fi adventure set to The Moon and Antarctica? Anything is better than what you’re doing now.

Please make it stop.

1 comment:

Scrap Heap Pete said...: I think we need to ask the question, "Why is Jeff Mangum allowing this to happen?"; 3:56 PM

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A History Of Trash

Trash, at first, was a pretty cool guy. You know, he’d come over with some beers, and you’d hang out and have a couple of laughs. Maybe Trash brought some weed with him, and you guys tried to sync up Dark Side Of The Moon with The Wizard Of Oz until you remembered you lost your VHS copy of that movie sometime in college and that you fucking hate Pink Floyd. Good times were had, nonetheless.

But then, you don’t know what changed, but Trash started to overstay his welcome. He’d just linger for hours, never taking the hint you wanted him to leave, no matter how many times you yawned obnoxiously or mentioned how early you had to get up tomorrow. Trash just didn’t get it. You were getting older. You didn’t have the time anymore to stay up until 3 a.m. to talk about the Port season of “The Wire” or how much you miss Jawbox. Eventually, you just stopped taking Trash’s phone calls and no longer replied to his group e-mails about sneaking into abandoned mental hospitals.

Last time you saw Trash, he was smoking alone outside a local dive bar, looking down at his decaying and mismatched shoes. You hoped he had been doing well. You hoped he had not been hurt by the disintegration of your friendship. And if he had, you wanted to comfort him. You wanted to tell him that even though people move on with their lives, it doesn’t mean they stop caring. You wanted him to see in your eyes a sincere appreciation for the time you shared, because all the relationships in our lives help make us who we are, and even if you weren’t the best of friends anymore, you wanted him to know that there would always be a piece of Trash in your heart.

But instead, you looked away and crossed the street. You were with your new girlfriend, and you really didn’t want to have to explain Trash to her. She’d never understand.