Destroyer's Kaputt

I've given myself the task of writing about one song a week for 2024 because, well, I think it'd be fun.

Destroyer's Kaputt

Happy birthday, Dan.

If my writing has any aesthetic, "Kaputt" describes it perfectly.

What a douchey aesthetic. Nevertheless, I write on.

"Kaputt" is still as strong a song when I heard it a decade ago as I listen to it now. It's so weird how much I long to be the song. Which is a crazy thing, to want to be a song. What does that even mean? I want to possess the song's sense, the song's flaws, the song's perspective. I want to be Leonard Cohen songs, I want to be Joni Mitchell songs, I want to be Destroyer songs. It's a crazy thing to want to be a Destroyer song, though I realize now I've been chasing Destroyer's monochromatic, collapsed, washed-out, burnt-out, yet romantic-despite-it-all aesthetic for so long, and I'll still be searching for it.

I cracked the joke in an old Destroyer article that you could find similarities to "Kaputt" and James Joyce's "Ulysses". Why not make good on the promise? Why the hell not. It's funny.

The direct comparison would be the Proteus episode. Dedalus resembles the singer of "Kaputt" the most.

The real entrypoint of the song is not the verses, but the musical intro, the glistening synths, the jangly guitar, and the sole horn (J. P. Carter on trumpet, I assume), which all convey the laziness of our singer, his inability and lack of desire to go and change his life, as he reflects on the waters of Vancouver's English Bay or Fraser River, take your pick. The horn is critical here; at the end of the intro it picks up in tempo, as if a boat suddenly appears from left of vision, bringing along with it the onset of memories.

The analogue is clear: it's the very first passage of the chapter.

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

I realize now this may be your first exposure to "Ulysses", or to postmodern literature generally ("Ulysses" is considered modern, but any novel that looks like a word salad I call "postmodern" for various reasons). Come to think of it, I shouldn't be surprised by the latter; most writing, in film and even as far as novels go, take after the romantic tradition, and the paragons of postmodernism are really fucking weird to the extent I can't imagine them being widely read, with the exception of Vonnegut or Heller whose novels are, nastily, named "satires".

I have been told by people that they find "Ulysses" annoying, so, if you're completely lost, I'll provide what I think is the most critical part of the book: James is trying to bring a human to life, and he composes him from his journey. Living, and feeling, and surviving, in a way are brave and heroic.

Dedalus, in particular, is undecided about everything. He's ambitious, but brooding; he's lofty, but sensitive; he's intelligent, but useless. Thus the duality of that beginning sentence, "Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes." It's an extremely pretentious thought, a Frankenstein from the terms he learned in his university courses in philosophy, but it's also a beautiful thought wherein he makes a genuine attempt to understand the world around him in the language best suited for him. The broken italian serves the same purpose as well.

This is no different from the singer of "Kaputt". (This also has an odd parallel with the music video with the teenaged computer nerd, that I didn't anticipate.)

Wasting away,
chasing some girls, alright,
chasing cocaine, to the backrooms of the world all night,

resembles particularly two passages:

Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once...

Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. Moist pith of farls of bread, the froggreen wormwood, her matin incense, court the air. Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife's lover's wife, the kerchiefed housewife is astir, a saucer of acetic acid in her hands. In Rodot's Yvonne and Madeleine newmake their tumbled beauties, shattering with gold teeth chaussons of pastry, their mouths yellowed with the pus of flan breton. Faces of Paris men go by, their wellpleased pleasers, curled conquistadores.

I've probably said this a lot in other articles, but this is what I mean when I say a musician tells a story in few words: in those lines, poetic lines, really, they express all the sadness and regret that novelists, from the vastness and blankness of the page, can elaborate on.

So Dedalus lives, haunted by his own inability, haunted by his family's weakness, his mother's death, his ambitions, and his destiny, or what he feels is his destiny. He is "wasting away", "reading two pages apiece of seven books every night," bowing "to yourself in the mirror", imagining books he would write which a future someone will "read [in Alexandria] after a few thousand years". At the very least, this is someone smart enough to be self-aware of their faults.

As to whether the singer is actually addicted to coke, I point to the second passage referenced: we seem to place the danger and excitement of sin upon foreign places, for we have never lived nor grown there. (Thus Vegas' famous motto: "What happens here, stays here.") There's something romantic in thinking about what other people are doing; Leonard Cohen himself spent a lot of time wondering what other people were doing in the Chelsea Hotel or on the streets of New York. Everyone is "Belluomo [rising] from the bed of his wife's lover's wife", everyone is "Rodot's Yvonne and Madeline", and the singer is "chasing some girls", "chasing cocaine", not strictly those things themselves, but they are chasing their fellow man.

There's no clear analogue to the verse "Sounds, Smash Hits, / Melody Maker, NME, / all sounds like a dream to me," though the general sentiment is clear: the singer is reflecting on the smaller things in life (which is similar to the beginning of Destroyer's "Watercolours Into the Ocean" off "Destroyer's Rubies", "Listening / to Strawberry Wine / for the 131st time"). Between the "backrooms of the world all night" and "Sounds, Smash Hits" verses is an interlude where the guitar and the horn become prominent in the mix, as if the waters were churning and the swimmer is diving into deep water. After the "Sounds, Smash Hits" verse a particularly fuzzy, burnt-out guitar revs into the ear, sounding like a motor dying in the middle of the ocean. This is the kaputt-ness of "Kaputt", the feeling that one is a boat finally stranded at sea after so many years of struggling.

The verses

Step out of your toga and into the fog,
you are a prince of the ocean,
in a pinch, in the sky, in your eye.

Step out of your toga and into the ocean,
look, they've got your prints on the fog,
in a pinch, in the sky, in your eyes.

most resembles

Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in whispering water swaying and upturning coy silver fronds. Day by day: night by night: lifted, flooded and let fall. Lord, they are weary; and, whispered to, they sigh. Saint Ambrose heard it, sigh of leaves and waves, waiting, awaiting the fullness of their times, diebus ac noctibus iniurias patiens ingemiscit. To no end gathered; vainly then released, forth flowing, wending back: loom of the moon. Weary too in sight of lovers, lascivious men, a naked woman shining in her courts, she draws a toil of waters.

So the singer descends, or, in Dedalus' case, the waters ascend, engulfing them just as they render themselves naked to the world. The "diebus ac noctibus iniurias patiens ingemiscit" translates to "by days and nights it patiently groans over wrongs." Somehow Stephen, on the strands of Sandymount, contemplates on the relationship between sex and our conception into this world as spiritual beings. This sensuality is also brought up by the singer, in reference to the toga and becoming the prince of the ocean. I like the pun of "prints on the fog". It's another way the singer distracts himself from his present predicament by remembering his days as an artist. I think the "in a pinch, in the sky, in your eyes" is intentionally pablum, it's a means for the singer to cope with the difficulty of their memories, much as Dedalus relies on archaic ideas he learned from univerity to cope with his present situation.

Finally, the lyrics "I wrote a song for America, who knew?" have a simple analogue: "And no more turn aside and brood." This is a reference to Yeats' "Countess Kathleen"; the full lyric goes "And no more turn aside and brood / upon love's bitter mystery." All to say: who cares? But for Dedalus, this has greater significance, for "love's bitter mystery" involves more than some girl, it has context behind his mother's death. Thus it implies "Who cares about your problems?" and "My problems are everything real about me." The singer didn't write a song for America for no reason, but that reason, even to him, feels insignificant, just as Dedalus has no involvement in his mother's death, yet his guilt is everything in the world to him.

The rest is silence. After the descending licks of the guitar, the instrumentals finally die now, leaving only the horn to mourn that which cannot be named, or possibly even placed. And even this horn departs, to a wall of white noise. The metaphor of water becomes inadequate for the singer, and now there's only the wind's sound and fury remaining. Which is Dedalus' final glare over the sea:

He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.

I called Destroyer hipster music because it appeals to the worst and lamest things about me. That "I wrote a song for America" describes me disturbingly to a T. It is music that looks to the past and cringes at it, and looks to the present and only sees echoes of the past. Only in creating art, which comments on the present, which occasionally defies the present, is there consolation, but when one feels there is nothing noteworthy in one's life, the meaning of art becomes shallow too. Thus, hipster: a hollow obsession with things, with "Sounds, Smash Hits". Oh, I know this all too well. I'm the author of this blog, aren't I?

Perhaps that was Bejar's point. "Kaputt" is a depiction of being kaputt, of watching someone's self-destruction, and self-destruction happens slowly and silently, but it is only realized all at once. One seems to see everything but the blow-up. The song is only partially Bejar's narrative, it is more the emotions the listener puts into it, much as the eye creates the people and scenarios depicted in Kara Walker's silhouettes. (The concept of fantasy and the stories we convince ourselves are true has a great influence on the music video.)

"Ulysses" is the same way as well. People claim the book is difficult to read because of its references. James asserted it should be read as music. If you don't like a passage, move on to the next one.

Because authors desire to be read. It doesn't hurt to be understood, but understanding is transient, it is little lasting in the material world. Authors want the reader to experience the revelation that comes from reading a truly far-seeing novel, as they themselves have experienced, and revelation is not conveyed by Campbell's Hero's Journey, nor by Freytag's Pyramid, but by the sense of the words, for words and sentences carry sense, and not their dictionary definitions. Dan and James seek the music of the heart, and they both touched on the very essence, the very conflict of the artist, without calling them Starving, without calling them Tortured. It's fine if what they've shown is pretentious; that they've shown is enough.