I have heard this album so many times that the word "kaputt" has lost its meaning. Funny enough, I didn't actually know the correct meaning of the word when I first listened to the album. Originally, I thought "kaputt" meant something that "blew up." After a quick google translation, I have learned that the word simply refers to anything that's "broken." I suppose one could argue that I wasn't really wrong with my original definition of the word. Still, I am not an expert on the intricacies of the German language, which ironically made me give the word an exaggerated meaning. I guess my language skills had gone "kaputt" in that regard.
The word "kaputt" is interesting in that it is an adjective. It is not like "the car kaputts!" it is instead "the car IS kaputt!." With this comparison, I'm not trying to explain how grammar works, but rather point to the fact that kaputt is a state of being. So in a way, the word works much like the album, in that both describe a state of being broken. In my previous post, I mention the word apocalypse a lot, and it is the theme that stands out the most to me. Since the album speaks much about disillusion, I would argue that the singer thinks many things are now kaputt.
Love is kaputt "Take pills, for instance. I heard they're no good for you"
Dan Bejar, Blue Eyes
Memory is kaputt "You got it all backwards, girl. Enter through the exit, and exit through the entrance"
Dan Bejar, Suicide Demo for Kara Walker
Vanity is kaputt "Wasting your days. Chasing some girls, alright. Chasing cocaine through the back rooms of the world all night"
Dan Bejar, Kaputt
History is kaputt "Winter, spring, summer and fall, animals crawl, towards death's embrace."
Dan Bejar, Song for America
Intention is kaputt "I can't walk away, you can't walk away..."
Dan Bejar, Chinatown
Nostalgia is kaputt (In Bejar's case, the 80s) "Why does everybody sing along, when we built this city on ruins"
Dan Bejar, Poor In Love
Maybe these things were not kaputt at one point. The importance that I want to highlight with the use of the word is that the singer now knows these things are broken, but at one point he only knew they could be. There's a difference in saying "love can break" and "love is broken." One pessimistically acknowledges that something could come apart, while the other has already noticed that it has. In a bleak sense, it is the difference between thinking of a certain situation and actually experiencing that situation. So what we see in Kaputt is going through that heartbreak, that disillusion, that realization that things are not how they once were. What ends is not the world itself, but the world how it once was. An apocalypse that changed things instead of ending them.
Even though I can't completely know what the album meant to Bejar and the rest of the members of Destroyer, to me this is what it signifies. Kaputt in this sense is a ballad about how things used to be:
"The wind and the rain: To your detriment you try to explain. A government swallowed up in the squall. I can't walk away, at all, In Chinatown..."
Dan Bejar, Chinatown
and at the same time an acceptance of how things are:
"Free and easy. Gentle. Gentle.
The wind through the trees makes you mental for me.
Nancy, in a state of crisis, on a cloud."
Dan Bejar, Bay of Pigs
Bejar may have just been named the album after a book he has never read, but somehow the word fits so well to describe the feeling behind this album, or at least what I believe it to be after spending over a year of listening to it on repeat. I'm still not sure why this album captivated me so much, but I can only hope that by writing stuff like this that I can direct your attention to it. If you have a hankering for beautifully sad music, then check it out! And look forward to future projects. As with my own project that I have on the works, I can only hope to add to the beauty.