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.
Dressed in a shaggy Nordic sweater and dark Mao-ish cap, Mangum looked the very model of the modern hipster protest singer. But his lyrics—echoed by the crowd of hundreds surrounding him—were a long way from “Blowin’ in the Wind”:
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