The strangeness of an urban park crammed with people gleefully chanting words about premature burial notches up considerably when one knows-as anyone familiar with Mangum would have-that this is a song about Anne Frank. But his lyrics-echoed by the crowd of hundreds surrounding him-were a long way from “Blowin’ in the Wind”: Dressed in a shaggy Nordic sweater and dark Mao-ish cap, Mangum looked the very model of the modern hipster protest singer. When future scholars of non-paper textual artifacts explore the thousands of hours of shaky-cam footage documenting the Occupy Wall Street movement this past fall, after they’ve parsed the Manichean struggle of agreeable jazz hands versus dismayed waggle fingers, and noted that a staccato prose style best lends itself to recitation via the people’s microphone, they might puzzle over a video clip date-stamped October 6, when Jeff Mangum, the man behind the beloved indie rock band Neutral Milk Hotel, treated the occupiers in Zuccotti Park to an eight song solo set.
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