Song Meaning

Loudon Wainwright III's "Plane Too" isn't so much a song as a meticulously mundane inventory. It's a deadpan, almost Warholian list of the constituent parts of air travel, delivered with the knowing wink of a seasoned observer. The genius, if we can call it that, lies in the escalating sense of existential dread that accumulates as the catalog grows. At first, it's just a hipster, a sailor, a businessman – stock characters in a familiar tableau. Then comes the airplane food, the coffee, the booze, the increasingly desperate attempts to distract oneself from the disquieting reality of hurtling through the sky in a metal tube. The repetition of "too" adds to the feeling of inevitability, as if each item is another nail in the coffin of our shared airborne anxiety. The song's brilliance resides in its deceptive simplicity. Wainwright doesn't explicitly state the inherent fear of flying, the loss of control, or the feeling of being suspended between worlds. Instead, he lets the details speak for themselves. The "Vomit bag...Oxygen, too" pairing is a particularly potent example of this understated anxiety. It's a subtle nudge, a reminder of the potential for things to go horribly wrong. We’re not being told to be afraid; we're being invited to recognize the absurdity of our situation. The "No Smoking" sign, rendered in both "French and English, too," highlights the artificiality of the environment, the imposition of rules and regulations on a fundamentally unnatural act. The final verse, with its focus on the bathroom and the self-referential "mirror on the plane / Me, too," brings the song's themes into sharp focus. It's a moment of introspection, a confrontation with one's own mortality in the sterile, confined space of the airplane lavatory. The mirror reflects not just the physical self, but also the anxieties and vulnerabilities that we carry with us, baggage far heavier than anything stowed in the overhead compartment. In the end, "Plane Too," becomes a darkly comic meditation on modern life, a reminder that even in the most mundane of experiences, there's always a hint of the sublime, and a whole lot of the ridiculous.