In the last eighteen months, all while very much under employ of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, the Roots have managed to write and record three albums. The latest in that string, the upcoming undun, is also their most ambitious ever: it’s a concept album inspired by Sufjan Stevens, the Guess Who, and a list from a 1999 issue of SPIN, about a young man corrupted into a world of crime. (There are also weekly video accompaniments dropping). And the amount of content that has actually seen the light of day, by the way, only scratches the surface. In the new issue of Rolling Stone, drummer and band leader Questlove explains that during downtime on Fallon, while working in a studio space at 30 Rock, the band makes “On average … between three and 11 songs every day.” Yes, that is a shame-inducing amount of work and achievement! Which only makes Questlove’s latest trick all the more impressive.
Radiohead didn’t show up to play the Occupy Wall Street protests, as was rumored late last week. But Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel did. It’s a little like expecting the 82nd Airborne Division and getting the Luxembourg Navy, and that makes it all the more fitting. The protests will likely end up a lot like Mangum’s career: a yelp from the margins riding a momentary unfocused energy likely to collapse into itself before it takes any real shape.
Unless you’re the kind of person who spent more money on library fines than clothes in 1997, Neutral Milk Hotel weren’t even a blip to you. But for a second they were the hot shit in Lilliput: two very good albums of tweaky lo-fi indie rock on the label that’d later put out Arcade Fire. Mangum’s surrealist songs (about two-headed boys, the King of the Carrot Flowers, and the ghost of Anne Frank) and truth-hungry twee-trumpet of a voice were striking. Put those records on now and they still are. But just as he was peaking with promise, he dropped out of view, literally disappearing after 1998’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (which became a cult classic in absentia).
