tiny mammal kingdom: Destroyer's ironic magic trick
Why Dan Bejar's self-reflexive music is so amazing
‘I’ve been playing music for the last few years with an eight-piece band where they just go off and solo forever… you know, I’m barely singing anymore with the new songs, I just talk my way through it in a certain way… I vowed to never play guitar again [...] maybe people enjoy the struggle. Or maybe they don’t. [...] This is like an anti-advertisement for the show I’m about to play.’ — Dan Bejar, speaking ahead of his performance at Massey Hall in 2014
‘We swung from a string just to prove poetry unreadable / We rendered ourselves perfectly suited to public consumption’ — Destroyer’s ‘Queen of Languages’
(Haven’t listened to any Destroyer? Consider checking out this playlist I made as an introduction to what I love about them.)
Above: Destroyer’s Dan Bejar (photo: Stereogum)
I’ve been thinking about irony a lot lately. For class the other week we were reading a piece by the poet and theorist Denise Riley talking about the ways that identity categories can become constraining or oppressive, even when entered into with the best intentions. Her solution — or part of her solution, at least — is irony: viewing the ways we label ourselves slightly askance, taking it not too seriously, stepping aside from the weight of conformity. Irony, as Riley puts it, is ‘speech which notices itself out loud’, ‘language presenting itself to itself’. It reminded me of how Donna Haraway describes her ‘Cyborg Manifesto’: ‘an ironic political myth’, taking irony as being ‘about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes [...] holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true [...] humour and serious play.’ In these terms, Destroyer’s singer and songwriter Dan Bejar is one of the foremost ironists I know. His music is suffused with what Riley would term the ‘self-reflexivity’ inherent in irony, constantly presenting its craft to itself and his audience, holding humour and seriousness together in one performance.
Let me clarify what I mean by this by talking about lyrics. At the most basic level, Destroyer’s lyrics don’t really mean anything. Indeed, Bejar himself has suggested that this is by design: in an interview with Prefix Magazine, he commented that he disliked the ‘idea of words meaning something as opposed to doing something. As opposed to the effect they create.’ This isn’t to say that his lyrics don’t have any intended semantic content, or that they aren’t very complexly written — indeed, his early lyrics are characterised by a maximalist accumulation of (self-)references and images in a way which occasionally feels dizzying. But although his lyrics can be extremely hard to pin down in exactly what the images are attempting to achieve or what they mean — go to the lyrics pages for the songs ‘Rubies’ or ‘Notorious Lightning’, for example, and attempt to parse a single full verse — I’d argue that that’s the point, and a reflection of his general project. He’s not interested in his words actually meaning anything, although most songs do focus on a specific general theme, image, or character. He’s interested in what they do — how they sound, but also their effect on the listener. There’s clearly an attempt at disorientation in his early lyrics, but as he changes styles — for example, moving into some kind of fantastic smooth jazz/80s soul nightmare in Kaputt — this falls away. In Kaputt, Bejar is willing to focus on a single image for longer, and is no longer throwing quite so many ideas and references and just words at the listener. As he becomes more interested in something approaching accessibility — or at least smoothness — the way he uses words changes completely. And this reflects what I most love about Bejar’s music — his willingness to use various elements self-reflexively, showing his musical language to itself; showing the listener that nothing here is real, all that matters is its effects.
Above: the cover of Destroyer’s Kaputt, depicting a cityscape surrounded by mountains.
This isn’t just true of his lyrics. In my favourite review of Destroyer’s most popular (and probably best) album Kaputt, Ed Comentale writes that
Bejar’s music has a way of getting at the junk in your head that you don’t even know is in there. He makes sounds that refer back to other sounds, lost sounds, all that pop detritus that you learned as a teen, affectively-charged bits of sonic data — solos, licks, drum-kicks — that still float around in the cultural ether.
A bit later, he suggests that Destroyer has listeners ‘reviving experiences real and imagined and making them matter all over again’, and I want to pause here and focus on that word, ‘imagined’. Because while Comentale is entirely correct that frequently Destroyer’s ‘sounds [...] refer back to other sounds’, sometimes they just feel like they should. ‘Streethawk II’, the final track on 2001’s Streethawk: A Seduction, perfectly evokes for me the feeling of nearing home after a long journey; but the lyrics don’t mean anything, the music itself isn’t particularly interesting. It creates an affective response which is entirely genuine, but it feels like Bejar wants to show you how artificial that response is. Bejar’s music frequently feels something like scratching an itch, in that for me it just perfectly creates these affective moments through this combination of lyrics and music and what seems like — but probably rarely is — accident. At about 2:30 in ‘Cue Synthesiser’, after a relatively long build-up of tension as Bejar repeats ‘I look around the room I see a room of pit ponies, drowning forever in a sea of love’, a backing vocal comes in on the line ‘wherever you are’ just before Bejar, and that tension just releases. It seems effortless, accidental, but it’s extremely controlled.
‘Cue Synthesiser’, actually, is a good example of what I’m talking about. In a recent episode of The Pitchfork Review, Andy Cush comments that Bejar’s songs ‘work by suggestion and implication, just throwing evocative images next to each other without really explaining to you what they mean.’ And Bejar has, Cush says, worked to suggest that ‘he’s wandered into his own songs, and he’s taken aback’ by them, and ‘Cue Synthesiser’ takes this to another level. Although Bejar variously cues various instruments — literally, he sings ‘cue guitar’ — they never actually come in when he tells them to. But paradoxically, for me, that exactly shows that he’s totally in control of the music. What I’m saying, I suppose, is that there are two layers to the trick in Destroyer’s music. There is what Jeremy Larson describes in the same episode of The Pitchfork Review as a ‘misdirection’ like a magician’s patter — making all these references, throwing what Comentale would call ‘sonic data’ at you, playing at disconnection from the music which surrounds him — before suddenly conjuring this deeply affective moment, getting inside your head (an image used by both Larson and Comentale, perhaps tellingly). But he’s also pulling back the curtain, a bit; he’s showing you that this is all arbitrary, all make-believe, all ironic. In knowing that Bejar can’t actually be lost in his song, can’t actually be unable to control the music he wrote, we recognise that he’s in total control of it; so able to manipulate his sonic data that he’s willing even to pretend that he cannot.
Destroyer’s Dan Bejar, singing with his eyes closed.
Perhaps this is why Bejar is so willing to abandon individual sounds, ideas, even entire styles. This works at the level of individual songs — there’s a synth sound at one point in ‘Bay of Pigs’ which is utterly wonderful and never heard from again — and of entire albums. His earliest stuff is some kind of Hunky Dory-era Bowie soundalike (indeed I’ve read negative reviews of Streethawk which critique it for sounding like someone trying to do Bowie but without the voice or charisma, which in some ways I suppose it is); Your Blues was memorably described as a potential ‘soundtrack for a Sega Genesis game about kittens studying post-structuralism’; Kaputt is 80s smooth jazz; Poison Season is some abhorrent combination of Sinatra-esque swooning with modern classical and some elements of rock/pop. It’s as if he wants to show us how he can manipulate all these esoteric and seemingly incompatible styles to create something extremely moving. Matt LeMay, reviewing Your Blues, talks about ‘Bejar’s ability to craft deeply moving passages out of ostensibly artificial and contrived elements’ in the context of that album’s use of ‘unapologetic MIDI instrumentation, glaringly theatrical vocals, and that ubiquitous but rarely implemented synth preset called "aah voice."’ But Bejar’s showing us the artifice — and specifically his artifice — across a range of genres and styles, showing us how he can discard sounds and styles and concepts just as quickly as pick them up because they’re all just styles, something he can craft and wear with irony.
I know a lot of people see Destroyer’s music as empty or meaningless in the face of this ironic approach to music-making. I can see the argument: maybe he’s very clever, but why, if all the affect is in some way faked, if he’s showing you the trick, should you still be moved by the music? If he’s showing you the unreality of his songs, why should you encounter them as real? I have, I suppose, two responses to this. One is that it’s fascinating to me to see this work in real time: to see the ways in which the contradictions which Destroyer’s music is formed of — the simultaneous evocation of affective realness and utter destruction of its foundations — are held together in what still forms a cohesive whole. To see, that is, the contest and collaboration between humour and serious play. The other response is that at the heart of irony is taking things extremely seriously. Destroyer’s music genuinely does provoke an emotional and affective response in me: I want to sing along to ‘Notorious Lightning’, I’m moved by ‘Streethawk II’, I find ‘Suicide Demo for Kara Walker’ absolutely beautiful and heartbreaking. These are really good songs, and not just as intellectual exercises. And the trick is to hold the joke and the truth all at once.