Week 4: Destroyer – Kaputt (2011)

Modern music’s greatest vice is a desire to resurrect and mimic past triumphs. This has been true, to an extent, of every decade since pop music’s ascendance in the 1950’s, but I believe that the temptation now is even greater than it ever has been. In an era where, for the first time in decades, albums selling less than 20,000 copies can land in the Top 10, the music industry is probably more desperate than ever to revisit the years where a novelty song like the truly onerous “Disco Duck” could go Platinum (meaning it shipped 2 million copies and that I have to have another drink).

Aside from efforts to catch lightning twice and revisit past glories, some artists prefer to travel back in time simply to emulate their personal musical heroes. Rock musicians have been taking cues from old blues musicians since the early 60s, with two albums in particular (At Newport 1960 by Muddy Waters and King Of The Delta Blues Singers by Robert Johnson) serving as cultural touchstones for early English rockers, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin in particular. Similarly, The Beatles were heavily influenced by Elvis (“Run For Your Life” quotes “Baby, Let’s Play House”), Chuck Berry, and Roy Orbison (“Please Please Me” was influenced by “Only The Lonely”, as well as a Bing Crosby line), among many other 50’s musicians. Beyond nods and acknowledgements, these past songs and artists served as simple inspiration; a foundation for their own advancements.

Aside from the melodic and stylistic influences noted above, musicians and producers often turn to the past for its simple sound. That lo-fi, crackling atmosphere of old blues, rock, and jazz music is almost fetishized by some modern critics and artists, and considered almost essential to the very idea of ‘good music’. One of my professors in college marked this as an increasingly desperate effort to make the music sound ‘authentic’.

The best way to understand authenticity is to look at the increasing disparity between recorded music and live performances. Though producers and artists alike have been altering sound during the recording process since the 50s (as I discussed last week), the early/mid 70s and 80s saw an explosion in the influence and power of the studio. Music began to take on textures utterly alien to those that came a few years prior, with artists like David Bowie, Yes, and Rush doing things that would have simply been impossible without recent breakthroughs in music tech. Some of it was brilliant, some of it… wasn’t, and as the 70s gave way to the mid-80s, the glean of production grew even more blinding.

I’ve pointed out before that no development or technique in music is objectively bad; even Autotune and cheap drum machines can be used to create quality music. However, the abuse of technology (abuse meaning use with no real meaning or point beyond, “Hey, look what we can do!” masturbation) is virtually always a bad thing. And that’s exactly what began happening in the late 80’s. Suddenly, even rock music was beginning to lose its bite, and even the costumes and makeup of glam rock started to look positively conservative.

Both the late 70s and early 90s saw an immense backlash against the music that came immediately before it; both movements were grounded in an effort to make simpler, more direct music, and both of these were depressingly short-lived. The effort towards authenticity faded, and the genres gave birth to movements ranging from the good (but different) to the truly, truly horrible.

It seems reasonable to conclude, based on the persistent reemergence of slick production, that the genie cannot be put back into the bottle. Aside from the brief reprieves of rock music that we get every five or six years (The White Stripes, The Strokes, and The Black Keys are all good examples of recent oases) the public seems fully ensnared in the discotheque geared overproduction of contemporary R&B and (to a lesser extent) MOR soft rock like Coldplay.

While I appreciate good, solid rock music as much as any true music fiend, I don’t think it’s the only way to escape from pop music’s sound. Besides, while the quest for authenticity can generate some great stuff, it often slips too far into lo-fi for my tastes. I’ll never understand why artists choose to mask their music behind static and crappy analog recording equipment; it seems that many musicians believe that the artists of days long past used tape recorders due to an artistic choice, or that the degradation of vinyl is something to be embraced. I find it ridiculous and worse, disrespectful to music itself. There’s nothing wrong with hi-fidelity, or even slick production techniques. All that matters, in the end, is whether the music is good.

Which brings up to this week’s entry into the 52 Weeks; Kaputt represents Dan Bejar of Destroyer’s self-stated first foray into pop music, and judging from its sound he sees pop as having its origin in the production heavy muck I’ve been discussing for the past several paragraphs. What Bejar has in mind though are the positives from that era; the songs that used production and the capacity of the studio to produce perfect kernals of pop. This was the music geared towards the studio’s many enviable strengths, and it stands in stark contrast to other genres that attempted to slip into the mainstream using pop techniques. It’s a different kind of authenticity, the kind that acknowledges one’s goal and uses every tool at one’s disposal to achieve it.

Just as the artists above quoted their musical forefathers without a hint of shame, Bejar takes the smooth fidelity and saxophone riffs from 80s pop and builds his own ideas around them. What elevates this above certain other emulations is that Bejar is using all of this in service of his songs. This album isn’t written like a novelty or shameless piece of retro-fetishism, nor is it something that could be slipped into a 80s playlist without anyone calling foul.

In spite of its genre and style, this is an album clearly of its time. Part of this is Bejar’s idiosyncratic vocal style, which is too laidback and unconcerned with theatrics to be at home in 80s pop, but a more significant element is simply a result of modern tech. We’ve come a long way tech wise since 80s pop, and Bejar isn’t afraid of showing off his and his producers’ mastery of the modern studio. This allows the album to be an evolution, rather than simple emulation, of the classic 80s smooth rock style.

In general, I think this is the best approach to the ever-growing field of musical aides and modifiers. It seems needlessly regressive to ghettoize the studio as a whole in favor of broom closets and tape recorders; it’s perfectly possible to create good rock music in a studio setting, with studio techniques and studio musicians. Both Nevermind and Never Mind The Bollocks made heavy use of the studio, with overdubbing being the most common (the former used it for vocal double-tracking, while the latter used it to generate titanic guitar riffs). Led Zeppelin is considered to be the pinnacle of hard rock by a number of (very vocal) music fans, and their music would have been impossible without the studio trickery available to them. That goes double for The Who, and was obviously essential to late-period Beatles albums.

Similarly, using modern studios to generate shortcuts to sounds from older eras is even more pointless. Not only is it lazy, it accomplishes nothing more than creating a shortlist for the next Led Zeppelin or AC/DC tribute concert. We already have music that sounds like that, so why mindlessly ape it?

I’m not saying every band currently working should work in the same genre as Kaputt, but the issue with cheesy 80s soft rock songs wasn’t the technology but the songwriting. Sax solos may have been a bit overused back in the 80s, but that doesn’t make using the saxophone on a song bad; it can be grating, laughably enjoyable, or absolutely essential, all depending on how the song itself is constructed. Kaputt itself uses sax quite prominently, especially on album standout “Poor In Love”, and it’s not only good but is arguably essential.

Another thing that marks Kaputt as odd in a modern context is the fact that it is clearly intended to be listened to as a whole. This is not an album that’s easy to breakdown, which is one of the main reasons why I haven’t been putting many individual songs in this write-up. More than any of the other albums I’ve written about so far this is an album meant to be listened to as a whole (next week’s may well supersede this one in this department). You’ll have to fight that iTunes/Kazaa/Napster mindset my generation has had for so long and actually consume it one sitting, not all piecemeal like. Rest assured, it’s worth your time.

Cheers.