Chicago audiences were always really kind to Destroyer. From the echoing ballroom
wooooing at the Logan Square Auditorium to the quiet-as-I've-ever-seen-it hollows of the Empty Bottle, I felt pretty confident that almost everyone around me thought Dan Bejar was as much of a genius as I did--even that we were maybe competing in our adoration.
Last night I had my first NYC Destroyer experience, and it was both amazing--one of those one-off experiences that only happen in New York, that would make me pouty-jealous before I moved here--and odd to be sitting down in Columbia University's Miller Theater surrounded by audience members who may have been Destroyer fans, may have been Loscil fans, or may have been devotees of the
Wordless Music Festival, for which both bands were playing collaboratively.
It was a Destroyer show for the true fan, a multimedia performance art jam that you'd feel bubbling under the surface of those rock club shows, where you never knew if Dan was going to thank you or flip you off for your fandom, so antithetical to the
fuck-off, music industry ethos of some of his recordings--
The money's been bought up and, surely woman, you can feel it.
And the music's all washed-up. They'd rather sell it than steal it.
As the festivals run dry, these whorish children can't look you in the eyes
as you turn them out and turn them into something beautiful.
For the party of the century is still looking for a reason to be.
("Death on the Festival Circuit," Thief, 2000)
And yet there he was playing for you, so you figured it was a draw.
Last night it was something else. The first Destroyer song, "Certain Things You Ought to Know," was pretty straightforward, thought it did contain some underwater-megaphone-esque vocal effects that were actually pretty venue-appropriate--they probably worked better in a classical music auditorium than they would have many other places. "Foam Hands" was just as strident as you wanted it to be. A little
+ sign next to Loscil's "Grief Point" (
Endless Falls, 2010) on the program indicated "words by Dan Bejar," which could have easily meant lyrics, but oh no. Suddenly Bejar was leaning against his stool, holding his beer, reading what we might, reductively, call a "spoken word" piece to the background of Loscil's ambient electronic music. It was a poetics of sort--a (what else) self-referential piece about the construction (destruction?) of the song that they were ostensibly playing. Like a Destroyer song, it was full of wild imagery ("picnic baskets full of blood") and self-scrutiny: after criticizing himself for writing confounding music that even he doesn't understand, and urging himself to only write what he can comprehend, Bejar came to a sort of calm about his self-reproach: "It's good. It means I've changed."
I don't know if those words will actually accompany the Loscil recording next year, or if the piece was written for the performance, but as I found myself giggling at the self-referentiality and the dramatic way Bejar dropped the first page of his "poem," I realized no one else in the auditorium was giggling. At least not so I could hear them. So then I thought--as I had passing the imposing gates of Columbia on the way in--about Bejar's apparent NYC aversion ("New York's sick, you've had your chances"), about "kids," about how an Ivy League audience's relationship to the pretensions of the art and indie rock worlds--which Destroyer mocks so hilariously--was going to be a lot different from rock-club-goin' kids' relationship to pretentiousness.
To whit,
this guy's reaction to Dan's final performance of the night, "Bay of Pigs" (for which my mouth was hanging ajar in delight for all 13:39, not only for the excitement of seeing it live and DB's histrionic vocal delivery, but also for the slideshow of promo shots of Dan that slowly or jerkily zoomed in and out behind him to the beat of ambient disco):
Add on top Bejar’s uncanny resemblance to Adam Sandler in his performing style and you have something that was truly bad. The puzzle is whether it was bad by accident, or bad on purpose. As a work of music and a performance, it was thought-through, polished and confident, it’s just that the ideas are so terrible that it’s hard to conceive of something that is sincerely so unselfconscious, so egocentric and so lacking self-awareness. Is it meant to be a parody? If so, it is deeply weird. Is it serious? Then it is embarrassing. It was truly difficult to discern, but the fact that Bejar’s image on-screen lingered for a slow fade long after he had left the stage was a matter for concern.
This is exactly what I thought people were sitting there thinking! It was pretty stiff in there.
I'm not going to sit here and pretend Destroyer is for everyone, but I would like to point out that it's exactly these questions--"Is it meant to be a parody?" "Is it serious?"--that Destroyer seems to always be asking, and it's in the tension between those two poles that DB's genius lies. Parody is recognizable to any student of postmodernism; seriousness, I assume, is a sincere value at a place like Columbia. By being both serious and parodic and neither serious nor parodic, Destroyer's music collapses the space between those concepts, and does it with jam and glam.
