Dan Bejar’s not a poet proper, more of a drunk trying to pluck fistfuls of feelings from the ether. A modern Morrison, just a little shyer. Remember: he sings with lyric sheets, and it’s hard to tell what parts of the music came from Bejar vs. the murderer’s row of studio musicians he assembled under the Destroyer moniker. I don’t think it matters. In concert they play like a band on a mission, with the energy of a disco group but the mood of a funeral parlor. At Pitchfork Music Festival they were the only band Matthew and I made an effort to see, firmly sticking ourselves up front in the crowd after a weekend of meandering about the park grounds without much care. At one point he told me we’d leave after “Bay of Pigs,” but we knew there was no point counting the minutes: it was coming last, or not at all.
I suspect other records were good this year, but to be honest, they didn’t matter much to me. It was Kaputt vs. everything else. I listened to the title track dozens of times past counting on Spotify, the others right behind it. I read the sonic palette described as inspired rather than original, but to me it felt more out of emotional necessity rather than banal experimentation. I didn’t try to follow up, though; all that mattered to me was how good it sounded, not where it was coming from. “Bay of Pigs” was the ultimate bridge between tastes, a song I’d play for all of my friends when our energy was running low and the night was getting long. Later they’d chime in with their own thoughts after going home and getting the record themselves. “It just puts me in a good place,” one friend said. “Christine… why?” texted another, clueless of the real lyric. I’m a sucker for this; I like when I can share songs I like with people I like and have them like it in return, aesthetic or political argument be damned. As the year went on Kaputt became the link between everyone I knew, the record I could throw on in the background without much decision.
It got harder to think and write about music this year, once I realized it was easier to get paid for opinions that came from the middle rather than my own myopic corner of the world. I suppose it would have been easier to stay unpublished, but not with bills to pay and professional connections dangling in the wind. I tried not to write disingenuously; I did enjoy the Katy Perry concert, embarrassingly enough, but there was the sense that it was necessary to detach a little bit in order to find the greater meaning for an audience past myself.
This is a necessary evil with most professional analysis, I suppose, but with music it felt like a death knell to something I’d gotten used to arguing about so emphatically in real life with my friends. There’s something lost online where every statement is part of a whole, especially when the line between personal and public persona is so easily blurred. The most successful online pieces are the ones that do a good job insulating themselves from any possible critique of any kind, because it’s only nature to respond to something you disagree with by reading in between the lines and finding arguments that may or may not be there. Whether it’s a failure to communicate or a failure to understand, something’s wrong. I mean: read Internet comments, or the wells of Tumblr confrontations that spring up over invented controversies like anything regarding L*n* D*l R*y or M*r** C*ll*w*y. Endless circular reasoning concerning intent and tone, the message/ideas pushed to the side.
To be honest, it’s not my finest medium; my reflexes quicken, my logic thins, my temper flares and every response seems increasingly pointless. More often than not I gave up on fights of this kind because I found myself lacking the energy to defend inconsequential opinions against people I didn’t know. It was easier to concede that the answer was probably somewhere in the middle, as it usually is, easier to be Buddhist as fuck and let people assume the worst, to ride out interior imperfection as long as I could square it away within myself. The important part being to get over and on with it.
All of this comes back to Kaputt, somehow. It was the only album that sounded as calm as I needed to be to get through the year, which I’m worried sounds too maudlin but the hell with it. 2011 was the first year since 1994 that I spent without some academic calendar or sense of linear A—>B timetable. The months sped along like the songs, at tempos too quick to absorb out what was going on, too slow to be completely fun. Weeks spent out of work and wondering what everyone else was up to to. Your typical millennial crisis of identity, but apologies to the Internet, they happened to literally almost everyone I knew this year and they took more time to deal with than reading a Gawker post about sucking it up or what have you. Mostly everyone I knew spent some time feeling a little tired and worrying how the years after would follow. I’m sure it was unwarranted or entitled, that we should all be so grateful for our privilege to feel so tired while still working jobs for money that allowed us to buy food and iPhones and MTA passes, etc. We were, trust me. But feelings can seem like facts, and they could take a little while to figure out.
Consider the tools: Bejar sounds like he’s singing karaoke to an empty room, one cleared out by drunken attrition. The saxophone is key. It cuts through the fog with Bejar wandering behind, unable to clarify or interpret. “Bay of Pigs” came out in August 2009; Kaputt was released in January 2011. It’s tacked on not from laziness (as “Rainbows in the Dark” was reused on Das Racist’s Relax), but because it’s the only proper conclusion at the end of the night, miles away from the starting point. “I’ve seen it all,” he repeats, in both disbelief and understanding. Even when you know where something ends, it can be impossible to tell how you got there in the first place. Four or four hundred more years of this shit, it all blends together. I’ll leave off with a Philip K. Dick quote I posted last week: “So live through it; I mean, go all the way to the end. Only then can it be understood, not along the way.” Happy 2011, y’all. 2012 can’t come fast enough.
