YMMV / News at 11

• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: The inclusion of Matt Lauer's interview with Richard Hack promoting Hack's biography of Howard Hughes. Hack describes Hughes as a "sociopath" who hated people, who spent his last years conducting business in a dark room, paranoid about germs because of his upbringing, but was also "absolutely the most amazing man that America has ever created, ever." The inclusion of this clip could be cynically read to parallel America itself after 9/11: undoubtedly great, but paranoid, in the dark, and hostile.
• Genius Bonus: While it's not too hard to figure out that the soundbites are from the morning of September 11, 2001, there's also an unhappy bonus knowing when exactly some of these clips took place, or what was going on in the clips themselves at the time.
  • It's not apparent while listening to the album, but the CNNfn clip at the beginning of "Morning Commute" included a fade to a shot of the World Trade Center towers — roughly 46 minutes before the first attack — right as anchor David Haffenreffer says the words "here in New York."
  • The CNN financial update and commercial break used in "Financial News" happened literally right before CNN cut to breaking news about the North Tower; the Ditech commercial that ends the soundbite was interrupted with CNN's first shot of the disaster. Ditto with the Today commercial break and clip used in "Financial News" and "Tuesday Television" respectively.
  • Speaking of, the North Tower had already been hit by the time of the commercial breaks, the Matt Lauer clip, and the Amanda Lang clip; Lang was actually at the New York Stock Exchange just a few blocks away from the World Trade Center and was filing her report approximately one minute after the first impact (apparently unaware as to what was going on outside). NBC's commercial break is especially noteworthy as Matt Lauer had just previously verbalized that something had happened at the WTC before throwing to commercial (as NBC didn't have a live shot ready yet), and the commercials aired right when all the other networks had already broken into attack coverage, meaning it was literally the last moments of any American network normalcy that day.^note To go even further, this also means that the final normal commercial to air on any major American network that day was a McDonald's ad. Do with that what you will.
  • The Hillary Howard clip at the end of "Heli Tours" is from CBS affiliate WUSA, and the weather forecast clip that "Financial News" cuts away to is of meteorologist Tom Kierein at NBC affiliate WRC. Both stations are in Washington, D.C. — which, as we know, was the other metro area attacked that day.
  • Similarly, though CBS' The Early Show was based out of New York, Mark McEwen was actually doing a remote in Los Angeles while there to cover the Latin Grammys. LA wasn't attacked that day, but it had been the intended destination of three of the four hijacked flights.
  • The second half being nothing but "Local Forecast" music and soundbites from The Weather Channel helps to reflect the fact that TWC was one of the few cable news broadcasters — if not the only one — that stuck with its regularly-scheduled programming on 9/11 without focusing squarely on the attacks.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Didactic?:
  • Given the subject matter of the album, it's not difficult to have multiple interpretations. Is it an attempt to capture the last moments of normalcy before the United States changed forever? Is it an attempt to ignore the attacks by delaying the inevitable, then switching to The Weather Channel when it becomes unavoidable? Is it a commentary on the phoniness of pre-9/11 American life? Is it a look into a parallel universe where the attacks never happened, September 11, 2001 was just another normal day, and the night watchman at the World Trade Center fell asleep watching the weather?
  • YouTuber Pad Chennington talked about his own experience with the album as he listened to it on the 16th anniversary of the attacks, with 9/11 footage piped into one headphone and News At 11 piped into the other, describing it as "two different dimensions, reality and romanticism, at war."

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