I don’t think I could put into words how Kaputt as an album makes me feel. However, I may be able to show people. In writing this, my aim is to summarize what the album means to me. In doing so I hope to come up with a method to show people the elusive feeling I get when listening to Dan Bejar’s beautiful and abstract poetry backed by a retro and yet modern sound of soft rock on all ten tracks, from “Chinatown” to “Bay of Pigs”.
But first, what is Kaputt? Have you heard the word before? Most likely. In German, it translates to “broken”. To Bejar, the front-man of Destroyer, it is the name of a book which he admits he never read, but from which nonetheless the name of this project is derived. To me, this is quite the fitting name. When thinking of the album as a whole, I think of three things: fantasy, nostalgia, and the apocalypse. What do these all have in common? They are all connected by a single thread made up of Love. If I were to put the album’s central theme in one sentence it would go like this:
“We know the feeling of love has failed us when fantasy is taken as truth, so we must destroy our outdated notions and create a new world from the new love we’ll create.”
In other words, what has broken here is the fantasy, which in this album takes upon many forms. The fantasy of the rockstar-lifestyle; the utopia; 80s music; and even the fantasy of love itself. Love is found in fantasy the sense of complacency it gives us. Love is found in Nostalgia in the sense of comfort it gives us. Love is found in the apocalypse in the sense of relief it can give. When the world ends, what comes next? We don’t know, really. We hope that it gives us a chance at starting over in a whole new world, a clean slate in some sense. What we do know is that the previous world is nothing we should ever worry about again. So, when the fantasy is broken, nostalgia is deemed overrated, and the world as we know it comes to an end, is it a sad or happy feeling, then? That’s the grey area I hope to explore with my own project.
So what is my project actually. Since the ten year anniversary of the album is coming up in a few months, I would like to create something to commemorate it. My initial hopes where to create an album length music video by January 25th of 2021, since it would be exactly 10 years after the album was first released. However, my plans have been altered to release this work throughout next year. That siaid, even after writing all of that, I still haven’t come up with a concrete way to approach this project. I have loose ideas for the story and for the production of this, but I’m failing to put it together cohesively. Ultimately I think a music video will show how this album made me feel, and my hope is that soon I will come up with the answer I seek.
The world always seems to be going “Kaputt” all around us, yet we still retain a sense of hope as we get rid of the old and welcome the new with both doubt and a grand sense of curiosity.