A song that no one would expect me to love
It’s not that people don’t expect me to love Neutral Milk Hotel – most of my friends know that I do – it’s just the way this song starts; “I love you Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ I love you, yes I do.”
First playthrough of the album is in Angel, the copy bought in Boston. Speakers are turned up full because it’s a very bright day and it deserves loud music. I never used to close my blind there. It was January and cold too, and Jeff Mangum belts out through the speakers “I love you Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ I love you, yes I do.” I flush, I’m red, I don’t really know what to do. This raw and naked declaration of faith sets my skin on edge, I’m almost repulsed. I’m certainly embarrassed. I let the album play out. I play it again and again.
“I love you Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ I love you, yes I do,” burns me. There aren’t commas where I want them to be, he isn’t cursing about how much he loves you, he isn’t doing what Stuart Murdoch does by singing so vaguely his god could be a bag of crisps, he’s singing about Jesus. I push the moment away, turning the volume down when I know people are around, not singing those lines when my headphones are in. I feel shy when I hear it. I nearly switch the speakers off a few times. I don’t want the image of Mangum spoiled by religion. I don’t want him to believe in God. I want to identify with him, in a way that makes his nightmares and visions something close to the ones I write about about.
But I can’t repel the words, because again and again (and again and again – I played this album an awful lot) I hear him singing “I love you Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ I love you, yes I do.” And in a few weeks I hear it enough that it becomes normal.
It is normal, and brave, and good. Real faith, real belief, is still something I have huge difficulty with. I glue together my perception of how the world works with snippets of half remembered science, safe in the knowledge that we’re happy accidents who should be the best we can be because we owe it to one another, not to a higher being. And I can’t see why anyone would surrender a part of that, I just can’t. But Mangum can and he’s willing to really exhibit that part of himself, to place it all up front and demonstrate his faith, and I love it for that.
