Media Musings #04 - Destroyer
"I don’t see the state of things as this wildfire that’s gone out of control. I feel like in the case of America, it’s a slow, steady crawl to this exact point."
Each week, I’ll share a conversation about art, media and/or existence that I’ve had with an artist I deeply admire.
The brainchild of renowned Vancouver musician Dan Bejar, Destroyer has released records of idiosyncratic indie rock, subversively smooth easy listening, krautrock and dark post-pop, just to name a few. Whatever the form, each sound serves as an appropriate vessel for the sentiments contained in Bejar’s powerful prose.
The following chat with Bejar took place by phone in 2017 before the release of their fantastic album, “Ken,” and I subsequently interviewed him again ahead of Destroyer’s 2020 album, “Have We Met,” which appeared in the Spring issue of Relix Magaizne.
A couple of quotes from the following chat ran in this piece I wrote for Vulture about ‘existential pop’, a phrase I was very much trying to identify as a trend before my editor changed the headline. The rest has remained unpublished.
This conversation has been edited for clarity.
Dan Bejar, 3/9/20 @ Brooklyn Steel (Photo by Justin Joffe)
On Ken, are you using pop jargon to discuss other ideas? What’s the poet got to say about the zeitgeist?
I don’t know if it’s an outward-looking record or an inward-looking record, and I don’t know how much it varies lyrically from other Destroyer records. But I would say that it’s kind of more rock-based lyrics, maybe, in some ways. In a way, the style of the record was my version of conjuring up the music that first got me really into music, when I was a teenager in the mid-late ‘80s. A lot of that music had a certain harshness to it, if you think about it. I was into UK indie bands, and they still sounded like they were making pop music. And it was, it was Top 40 music in England. That was the big difference for me.
You mention in the press release that this isn’t a Suede record. But there’s definitely some love for them being explored here, too. You seem to tie it to a time and place.
Yeah, I mean, I wasn’t really thinking about Suede when I made the record, but I was thinking about the certain dour, gray, mystic poet-rocker type. Whether it was Ian McCulloch or not, I was listening to his solo record from the late ‘80s a lot.
There’s a Morrissey/Leonard Cohen line too.
Yeah, those lines come up. I always kind of liked the way that those English post-punk new wave guys would claim Leonard Cohen as an influence, which, in American music, was non-existent at the time. He was someone who could barely put out an album in the states. There was a supreme indifference from the American public, while in UK/Europe this kind of dark poetry could be embraced as a mass thing by a different generation of musicians who weren’t actually that interested in folk music.
The music critic for The New Yorker says that at certain inflective points in history, less accessible music can still find a large audience and make a tremendous impact.
Sure, that’s possible. I personally think that time is over and he should go rewrite his book, but in other cultures outside of the States it was true in the ‘80s, I guess. Teenagers really exoticizing and embracing that darkness as a three-minute rock song, even if it was just new wave bands getting really into Leonard Cohen and The Doors.
You and Cohen both sang to “the singer” or “the poet,” and Cohen was the master of duality in his writing. It feels like that duality has been knocked out of orbit these days.
It seems like Leonard Cohen is someone you’d have to address because he was at great odds with the protest song movement. He felt like topical music, and his not being able to find a place in it, was a dagger that struck him and probably had a lot to do with the feeling of him being an irrelevant singer, someone who would smoke clove cigarettes, wear a beret and not sing with a hippie ideology.
He didn’t really seem to be dreamt up by any particular culture. He didn’t seem New York/Velvets style, but wasn’t really European, either. If you know a little bit about the city of Montreal, you get a really good idea of how the aesthetics of someone like that is formed. It’s a European culture placed outside of Europe, and that could never be swallowed up by a lot of North American thing.
You said earlier that you’re not sure if this is an inward or outward record. My relationship to your music was that you were the bard or the professor, observing things and commenting on them from a few degrees removed. Cohen did that a lot too. It’s like Henry Miller listening through the walls to a girl he likes having sex. Are you a lyrical voyeur?
That’s quite possible, and to me it feels like a real standard writerly mode, you know? I don’t know if I’m super special that way. I think that exists. I feel like this record, in some ways, is a lot less intimate or personal than, say, the record that came before it. Less rambling, more simple and direct musically, as I was writing in these forms and thinking of this music of my teenage years.
Dan Bejar, 3/9/20 @ Brooklyn Steel (Photo by Justin Joffe)
I’ve started using very extreme terms in a very casual way, and when I quickly scan the songs it seems like every song refers to three or four things, steadily, throughout the record — terms of madness, violence, sickness, decadence and depravity. And then a narrator who is seeking some form of isolation or escape, or just watching the shit go down through a peephole in a hovel.
And you didn’t come to these ideas till after?
I mean, I’m always unconscious in my writing. A lot of these things exist in a lot of Destroyer records and a lot of Destroyer songs, and I don’t think about this stuff unless I’m really forced to, but when I look at the songs on Ken, to me it seems like a world in extreme decay, but the singer is not really inside of it. And it’s constant, and it’s direct, throughout 11 songs. And thats not normal, it’s not couched in other images like most Destroyer songs are.
I guess that’s why some people will inevitably call this your zeitgeist record. We’re all looking for symbols and codes right now, the same way we hear dog whistles from Washington.
Yeah, I guess so. I do see that seems to be a big byline these days, people writing records about the state of the union, you know? I don’t really see it coming from that place, but I exist in the world. Also, I don’t see the state of things as this wildfire that’s gone out of control. I feel like in the case of America, it’s a slow, steady crawl to this exact point. This is the violent conclusion to the way things have been going for some time now. To write amidst that aura isn’t something that special to the last year of my life.
What’s the deal with the last song, “La Regle du Jeu"? Were you watching the Renoir film while recording?
I for some reason started singing that line over and over again, which isn’t normal for me, that’s not how I write. It was giving me great pleasure, and at some point I started thinking of it as some sort of prayer or mantra, which is a very strange prayer or mantra, the title of a very important French movie [laughs]. I was thinking of a prayer or mantra you could sing over and over again to America in a language that America wouldn’t understand, referring to a movie that most Americans had no idea about.
I thought that would be an interesting prayer or mantra, and what I describe in the two verses before it are two very simple negative things. One in classical imagery, of nature dissolving or in conflict with itself, and the other a scene of a typically terrible party where something bad is about to happen. I kind of wrote it in an “All Along the Watchtower” style that got really transformed into the style of this record, the dark, euro cabaret vibe. Musically, it’s more fitting of the lyrics, more than I ever realized it would be.
Pop culture tends to be a great vessel for heavier ideas.
Sure. I was thinking of calling the record “The Rules of the Game”. It was an expression I couldn’t get out of my head, aside from the reference to the movie, as a group of words itself incredibly menacing and dark in ways I didn’t understand. Maybe it’s the day and age we live in. It seemed like very violent, vaguely apocalyptic expression, which is not something you’d normally associate with those words.