Talk:In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Track 10

Quite often, there are changes to the name of track 10. It should be Untitled without quotation marks, as it is untitled, not called "Untitled", as in the track listing of the album it says:

9 Ghost
10
11 Two-Headed Boy, Pt. 2

As far as I am aware, it is not called "The Penny Arcade in California", although it is listed so in a number of places on t'internet. In the 33 1/3 book (p35) it says:

It appears that on of the band members brought a recording device to the Musée [Musée Mechanique, collection of vintage penny arcade machines], then used the sound somewhere on In the Aeroplane over the Sea, explaining the notation "A Penny Arcade in California" that appears in the track listing on the poster included with the "Holland, 1945" single.

If anyone has a copy of said poster, please let me know whether "A Penny Arcade in California" is the title of the untitled track according to the poster...

--JuPitEer 16:26, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

• I was at Barnes & Nobles the other day and their little electronic music catalog even had track ten as "A Penny Arcade in California," though it is clear on the track listing on the album sleeve that it is untitled. I don't know where Barnes & Nobles gets their information.-72.145.72.73 (talk) 03:26, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Was it literally blanked out or was it titled '[untitled]'? I've removed the name from the syntax altogether.--Ilovetopaint (talk) 02:27, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

Capital O revisited

MOS:CT says that prepositions with four or fewer letters should not be capitalized. Based on that rule, the title should be rendered as In the Aeroplane over the Sea. There was no discussion the last time this issue came up, just a change. Is there a reason we should not change the title to bring it into compliance with Wikipedia's Manual of Style? —C.Fred (talk) 13:44, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

Agreed—I wondered the same, myself. Logic's sound. I put up a {{db-move}}. czar ♔ 19:02, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

Why didn't the rest of the Os get changed in the article then? Where is the official formatting for the title? Based on http://www.walkingwallofwords.com/, Over is capitalized. That's the band talking. Are they wrong? GeoJoe1000 (talk)04:17, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Okay, found a resolution on my own. GeoJoe1000 (talk) 14:10, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Redundancy in "Release" Section

Removed line "It was the sixth-highest selling vinyl album of 2008" for redundancy because it occurs twice within the same paragraph. I left the second instance because it seems to come more naturally after the report of the 2008 album sales. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:579:5214:2500:B9C2:67A9:6CFA:C17 (talk) 19:55, 20 April 2019 (UTC)

Critical Reception - views upon release versus more contemporary reviews

Maybe it's my impression but I feel like on other albums the reviews upon release are distinguished between more contemporary reappraisals of the album that come later. It seems like it would be even more important for an album like this one: while it may have always been generally viewed favorably by critics, it became mythic long after it's release. Even later less fawning reviews generally acknowledge that view isn't the consensus. But this article seems to mix the timely reviews with the more contemporary without distinguishing the two, and the change in how the album was viewed over time ends up lost in the shuffle. Gripdamage (talk) 20:09, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

Correct, it would be better to separate them (eg like the Kid A article). WP:SOFIXIT! Popcornduff (talk) 20:12, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

Placement of memes sentence

First off, never thought I'd type a title like that on Wikipedia.

@Brandt Luke Zorn: Anyway, my question is, wouldn't the sentence "Memes about In the Aeroplane Over the Sea proliferated on websites like 4chan, reflecting a wave of "hipster" listeners who first discovered the album online, long after the band had broken up" be better for the legacy section? I don't know a lot about the "history of memes" or what exactly was being said on message boards when the album came out (I discovered this album almost 20 years after it came out), but I'd assume the memes weren't really a thing when Mangum disappeared. Yes there were some rabid fans as Kim Cooper states in her book, but the memes didn't come until later. Famous Hobo (talk) 07:56, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

It's a good question—I started thinking through the same issues about structure and where certain stuff should go, but I only realized what a can of worms I'd opened partway through. I'll give you a long answer to go through my thought process and perspective, but most of this is a digression just for kicks. (For convenience, this is the revision prior to my edits.)

I initially kept all of the "meme" stuff in the "Legacy" section, since I was editing just that section. My attention went there in the first place after seeing this edit about Know Your Meme. XaotikHP was right that having a KYM page is not unusual or noteworthy in-and-of-itself, even for a late-1990s American indie rock album (see also: Football, American), but I checked to see if the cited A.V. Club article said anything else about the KYM page that would be notable, like if it was one of the first/largest KYM pages about an album (it does not). After I'd revised the meme bit in "Legacy", I saw that some of what I'd written overlapped with "Mangum's disappearance from the public eye", as that section already discussed the growth of the album's cult (including online) in the interim years before it had been fully enshrined in the rockcrit canon.

The organization of this part of the article is tricky. Clearly it needs to cover what happened between the album's release and its eventual acclaim, but I don't think it quite works to divide between one section titled "Mangum's disappearance from the public eye" and another section titled "Legacy". I've gone ahead and made an edit to show a possible alternate structure that may work better, though this is by no means the final or only possible structure since I'm still not totally sure what the best approach here is.

(Warning: Digression starts here.) To answer your underlying question, speaking now as a wisened 2007 NMH fan to a fresh-faced 2018 NMH fan: in broad strokes, you're right that the critical reevaluation came first, then the memes. But there's a slight chicken-or-the-egg aspect: "which came first, the internet-driven cult following or the critical acclaim?" While the memes emerged after the initial critical reevaluation, the album's internet-based rise started before critics had really taken notice. This is how I'd sum up its rise in stature:

1. 1999–2004: cult-fueled growth. The album's foothold in "the canon" is solid, but marginal: the earliest archive of Acclaimed Music (from October 2003) ranks In the Aeroplane at #21 for 1998 and #1235 all-time. It does not even rank in the top 200 of the 1990s. During this period its cult following grew organically through word-of-mouth and the pre–social media web, fueled partly by the legend of Mangum but mostly by the album's sheer originality and earnestness. Consider how completely different it is from, say, Slanted & Enchanted or Mellow Gold, which would probably have been the two most likely albums to be cited as prominent examples of "American indie rock albums of the 1990s". Not knocking those albums at all (I love Pavement more than any other rock band tbh), but back when "ironic slacker" represented the default picture of "90s indie rock" (and before Arcade Fire was known to anyone outside of Montreal) you can imagine how people would have recommended Neutral Milk Hotel as the kind of music "you've never heard anything like before".
2. 2005: critic-fueled growth. Critical consensus begins to catch up to the cult following. Pitchfork drops the 10, Cooper's 33⅓ comes out. The album is now seen as a minor-league "indie classic". At the start of 2005, Acclaimed Music had Aeroplane at #16 for 1998, #190 for the 90s, and #915 overall; by the same time next year, it jumped to #10 for 1998, #114 for the 90s, and #697 overall.
3. Mid-2000s to early 2010s: cult-fueled growth. A second wave of fans (too young to have been indie rock listeners in the late 1990s) discover Aeroplane, mostly online, many of them through reading Pitchfork (read: me). The album's critical reputation now fuels its cult, which also fuels itself but now at a much larger scale than before. The album becomes a fixture in the vinyl revival; by 2009 or so, you could reliably buy a new LP copy at Urban Outfitters. People are ripping it and sharing it on file-sharing services, torrents, and music piracy blogs (read: me). By 2009 at the latest, Neutral Milk Hotel has become a fixture on 4chan, and from that point onward a ton of people will first encounter the album as a star in /mu/'s constellation of "essential" music. I'm purely editorializing now but, if Lady Bird had been set in 2009 instead of 2003, Timothée Chalamet's character probably would have had In the Aeroplane Over the Sea on vinyl instead of (or in addition to) a Cannibal Ox poster.
4. Late 2000s through 2010s: critic-fueled growth. At some point, the album's critical reputation tips from mere "indie classic" to classic full-stop. It goes from being a "hidden gem" for people interested in "indie rock" to a frequently cited S-tier album of the 1990s or even all-time. This was a gradual process without any dramatic tipping point, but today Acclaimed Music ranks the album #3 for 1998, #46 for the 1990s, and #242 all-time.
   For perspective, it's worth noting that The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and Moon Safari held strong as 1998's #1 and #2 that entire time from 2003 to 2020, and most of the year's top ten more or less held in place too (with a few like Hello Nasty slipping a few places). 20 years ago, the idea that Aeroplane would come to be seen as better and/or more significant than the likes of Mezzanine or Hello Nasty—not just better, but obviously better, as a matter of general consensus and common sense—would have been a shock. It's also remarkable because, from the perspective of Acclaimed Music's algorithm, albums like Moon Safari, Hello Nasty, etc. started with (and still have) a huge relative advantage against an underdog like Aeroplane, thanks to the boosts from their initial year-end and decade-end acclaim. NMH's gains have been almost entirely after that period. Even Aquemini, another 1998 album that became a major critical darling more recently, hasn't risen as high: it started at #18 for 1998, a few notches ahead of Aeroplane's initial #21, and rose to #8. Point being, Aeroplane would rank much higher in a snapshot of current critical opinion (imagine something like the Sight & Sound greatest film poll but for music) than it does in an accumulation of all critical opinion like Acclaimed Music. At the populist Rate Your Music, where The People decide what the good albums are, Aeroplane is #1 for 1998, #3 for the 90s, and #11 (!!) all-time, outranking every Beatles album.

So anyway, that's my take.

tl;dr: For practical purposes, I think it's far easier and more sensible to summarize/organize the album's "aftermath"/"legacy" by topic (what happened to the band and Mangum; what happened with the fans/"cult"; what happened with critics) rather than a sharply divided before/after chronology (what happened between 1998 and the critical reevaluation vs. what happened once the critics reevaluated the album), since there's no easily disentangled before/after moment. —BLZ · talk 01:11, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

I've never been the biggest fan of having one paragraph subsections, but you make a good point in separating each topic by subsection rather than lumping everything into one big legacy section. BTW, that was a pretty impressive write up! I wish your response would be considered a reliable source, because it would have made referencing a whole lot easier. Famous Hobo (talk) 04:43, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

NME Top 500

NME (for The 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time) currently lists the author as "Emily Barker" [1]. Also is there any natural way to wikilink their respective article for top 500s (NME's The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time and Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time).  Spy-cicle💥  ^Talk? 20:31, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

@Spy-cicle: Hi there, just saw this. I updated the NME ref for the author. As for linking the two articles, I'm not sure. I could link the articles through the numbers (like 376 would link to Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time article, but I'm not sure if that would look good. Famous Hobo (talk) 15:00, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for that. That is one possible way but I think it could be considered MOS:EGGy by some. I mean I can think of a way of linking by altering the sentence but that would making artifically longer just for the sake of a wikilink. I wonder if there is a possible way to link through the Citation perhaps. Also sidenote, a shame this article did not pass FA due to not enough reviewers as it is certainly FA quality (and I would be willing to support it if it gets nominated again). Regards  Spy-cicle💥  ^Talk? 00:19, 9 October 2021 (UTC)

Title

Does anyone know why they used the British spelling of "aeroplane"? --DrJos (talk) 10:01, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

@DrJos: Sadly I'm not sure why. It's kind of surprising given all the material written about this album that no one has mentioned why they used the British spelling, or what the album title even means. Famous Hobo (talk) 00:50, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

"Up and Over" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Up and Over and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 March 14#Up and Over until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Richhoncho (talk) 20:51, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

"Untitled Neutral Milk Hotel song" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Untitled Neutral Milk Hotel song and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 March 17#Untitled Neutral Milk Hotel song until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Richhoncho (talk) 18:47, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

"Untitled (In the Aeroplane Over the Sea)" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Untitled (In the Aeroplane Over the Sea) and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 March 17#Untitled (In the Aeroplane Over the Sea) until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Richhoncho (talk) 18:53, 17 March 2022 (UTC)