a grammar

i am confused by certain descriptions of Destroyer’s “Kaputt”

My sense with Kaputt is that it doesn’t travel particularly well: at least some of its power relies on a particular past, and on that past having particular overtones, and if that’s not so familiar or resonant it doesn’t work quite as well. Like, I didn’t listen to sax-y soft rock in the 80s but I didn’t NOT listen to it, it isn’t something which could ever code as horrible or transgressive to me, so when I listen to Kaputt I feel there’s a whole strata of semiotic meaning I’m just not able to detect first-hand.

Plus I can’t stand his voice.

I love Kaputt, but I’ve spent the year being a little confused by the sales pitch that’s under discussion here — the one where the album is a “transgressive” reclamation of dangerously “uncool” sounds. It seems to me that indie acts have been doing that sort of thing more or less continuously for years and years. Since the early 90s, at the very least. To an extent that it’s become more of a staple — an ordinary approach — than any kind of clever or notable move.

Maybe it’s just that the process works too well — so well it becomes invisible, and is left forgotten. In the mid-90s, a lot of artists were making upscale, cerebral records from the scraps of 60s easy listening, and giving lengthy interviews about their appreciation for lounge music, exotica, bossa nova, Martin Denny and Esquivel and old Moog records — all things rock fans might have seen as used-bin kitsch and tittered suspiciously over. (The most visible example of this habit would obviously be Stereolab, but it was a lot more pronounced in some of their peers.) Or maybe you’ve enjoyed the sound of Yo La Tengo over the past 15 years — a sound that firmed up, later in the 90s, when they were seen as digging through potentially “uncool” influences like soft rock, wimpy folk, “lounge” music, and Burt Bacharach samples. Maybe you’ve enjoyed Air, portions of whose first album sounded like the theme from Taxi. There were acts that got well into the 80s, too; a Chicago project called the Aluminum Group made a handful of tracks that aren’t far from Kaputt.

This approach isn’t some forgotten anomaly — some of those groups are still extremely popular. But not much of what they’ve done sounds “transgressive” today. To be honest, it didn’t sound transgressive at the time — not for more than one listen, and mostly because the music press would tell you a lot about the playful influences involved. (Playful, whimsical; not transgressive.) Those types of albums sounded the way Kaputt sounds to me — like somewhat cerebral, mellow, artful records that are interested in plumbing a few specific moods, and are picking through a less-trafficked corner of our collective mental used-record bin to get at them.

I.e., moony records. It’s no coincidence that a lot of these “uncool” reclamations involve picking up on eras marked by really lavish, hi-fi studio productions — that’s exactly the kind of thing that passes temporarily into seeming like schmaltz (which means: gooey, melty, spreadable fat), then looks once again like a world of sonic possibility. Of course it’s a staple approach for heady, day-dreamy records.

Maybe that approach has dropped off enough that people have forgotten about it entirely. Maybe it helps that my life is timed out how it is — some of the sounds on Kaputt are the ones I’d have heard everywhere when I was too young to hear them as anything but ordinary music. It definitely helps that Kaputt is not nearly as “transgressive” as people claim — I don’t hear any interest on Bejar’s part in making an over-the-top pastiche of these sounds. What I’m especially sure of is that trangression is a big red herring here. Consider: There was a time when indie-rock bands bowing to Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys was considered slightly cheeky and uncool — exactly the kind of gooey studio daydreaming we’re talking about. That notion went through the wood chipper so long ago you would never guess it had ever been whole. And if you look back at the records that helped make that happen, it tends to be pretty clear which ones were running on a cheekiness or kitsch, and which ones were actually making something of it. Kaputt sounds to me like it’s entirely in the latter category.

(NOTE: Tom’s surely right that certain associations probably aid in enjoying the album — about the same way Boards of Canada probably sounded more interesting if you’d had to watch a bunch of warped old science filmstrips in second grade. Though I feel like a lot of the sounds on Kaputt lingered around long enough that they shouldn’t be too specific.)