Culture doesn’t evolve all at once. Nirvana released Nevermind in September of 1991, but Guns ‘N Roses’ Use Your Illusion II came out the very next month and knocked it down the charts. The arrival of grunge supposedly signified that leather was out and flannel was in, but leather wasn’t going anywhere. Nevermind popped up as the #1 album on the Billboard 200 for a week in January and for another week in February of 1992, but was later steamrolled for five weeks by Def Leppard’s Adrenalize, an album no one except hardcore leatherheads remember. But, as certain as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, culture DOES change. Gradually, leather began to smell a little musty and Les Pauls began to look passe.

 

Popular music is fueled by novelty. Singers seek new ways to sing. Guitarists seek new ways to play. Producers seek new ways to mic and mix drum sets. Usually the first album to find a new sound and present it in a song-like shape will have a good shot at climbing the charts. Take a few albums from the late ‘70s  and early ‘80s. The Sugar Hill Gang’s Sugar Hill Gang, Van Halen’s Van Halen, and Phil Collins’s Face Value all introduced the world to techniques and technologies that the world would copy for the next decade: Sugar Hill’s rap-rap-a-rappa flow, Eddie Van Halen’s guitar tapping, Collin’s gated drums. Pick up any record made in the following six or seven years, and there’s a good chance it’ll feature one or all of those techniques. 

 

In the 1980s, producers brought computers into the studio for the first time; FM synthesis allowed keyboard players to mimic not only pianos and organs, but horns, woodwinds, and instruments not yet imagined; and drummers were seriously worried that they would be replaced by programmable drum machines that didn’t fuck the bassist’s girlfriend or throw TVs out of hotel room windows (hell, Robert Grey of the art punks Wire even fired himself before being replaced by a drum machine). Artists created orchestras with their Yamaha DX7s, swamped their guitars in digital delay and chorus, and elongated their saxophones and flutes with reverb tails. Music with these characteristics screams, to me, “1980s!”

 

And by the time my brain came online in the 1990s, this shit was still everywhere, and it all seemed corny as fuck. Ironically, the most modern-sounding music tends to date the fastest.

 

Cut to 2011. 

 

After the turn of the millenium, the sonic prejudices of 1990s indie rockers had begun slipping away. Formerly verboten instruments like keyboards and synthesizers began taking a primary role on records by M83 and The Killers. Bruce Springsteen went from a boomer persona no grata to the patron saint of acts like the Arcade Fire and the Hold Steady. Even Phil Collins’s gated snare sound made a return. 

 

But, until the arrival of Destroyer’s Kaputt, one one specific, once very popular, sound evaded rediscovery of the big ears of enterprising indie artists: the ultra-lush sophisti-pop sounds of the 1980s as trafficked by Prefab Sprout, Sade, and late-era Steely Dan and Roxy Music. 

I think indie artists strayed away from soft rock/ocean breeze/sophisti-pop sound because, without distinct songwriting, it could melt into easy listening pablum, which is why Destroyer’s Dan Bejar was the perfect cat to revitalize the form. 

 

Bejar writes unusual songs and sings with an unusual voice. Ostensibly a solo artist, he’s also an on-again- off-again member of the power pop supergroup the New Pornographers, where he usually contributes their knottiest songs. As Destroyer (which for some reason I always thought “boat” instead of “Shiva”), up until Kaputt, Bejar best work was Bowie-inspired glam and art rock, although he had a predilection for switching up his sound record to record. Listened to backwards, the jump from Kaputt to his beloved 2006 album Destroyer’s Rubies doesn’t seem like much of a leap. But at the time, it felt seismic.

 

When I listened to Kaputt in 2011, my first thought was, “I can’t believe he’s going to try to get me to like this shit.”

 

Like Steely Dan, like Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, Bejar has the persona of an aging playboy. He’s well-dressed, well-read, hungover, sardonic, wry, and kinda over it. His acquired taste of a voice is an irritant next to the gentle perfection of his song’s soundscapes.

 

Similarly, Kaputt’s characters all feel like they’re at the end of their respective ropes. In “Kaputt” a character chases girls and cocaine through the “back rooms of the world.” “Suicide Demo for Kara Walker” touches on the legacy of slavery in the US. In “Bay of Pigs (Detail)”, Jarvis conflates a dissolute life with the CIA’s failed invasion of Cuba. These aren’t the typical subjects you hear about while a saxophone blows long reverb-y notes over shimmering synths and swaying grooves. 

 

And, yet, it all works. In fact, it works so well that it made me reassess some earlier albums that I had dismissed as outdated cheese, including Roxy Music’s Avalon, Prefab Sprout’s Steve McQueen, Steely Dan’s Gaucho, and Sade’s Diamond Life. These are much more than the auditory wallpaper I had assumed them to be – although they are also that, too. 

However, the best revival music not only casts a light backwards, but forwards as well. And I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb to say that the critical success of Kaputt contributed to the popularity of vaporwave. Certainly, Bejar approaches the music with a more reverence than the vaporwave’s chop and screw DJs, but it does stem from the same impulse: to make something pretty a little ugly. With Kaputt, Destroyer took yesterday’s cheese and turned it into today’s stilton gold.