As usual, before writing a review of something rather public, in the limelight, i.e. an album which doesn’t necessarily need a signpost pointing out its existence, I cast about to see if anything needed to be said about it – that is, what were other reviewers writing about it, and was my experience or understanding of Destroyer’s Rubies fundamentally different enough to warrant writing something. As I never received a promotional copy, there was never a quasi-ethical impetus to jot down a few paragraphs for publicity, thus if something is going to be written, it has to be for its own sake or for the sake of another, viz. in order to add meaning or in order to correspond (in an epistolary sense, not in that of verity), or to respond, rather.
As it so happens, Matt LeMay wrote a perfectly fine review, which I think says a good deal about the album, and presents a reading of it – one that deals with the emotional content of Rubies rather than its intellectual payload – that is rarely found. As we live in a historical period in which intersubjective and multiple interpretations of art objects are standard, I don’t wish to argue against LeMay, though I do not share his opinion; however, what I would like to do is rather argue for why or rather explain why the emotional content of Bejar’s work – if there is emotional content at all, I want to say – is monumentally obscured by the literary, the intra, inter and metatextual references, and why I think an emotional reading, while certainly valid, is perhaps flawed. I understand already that there exists a tension here: at once I want to say that LeMay’s reading is perfectly fine and at the same time I want to caution against it, against an emotional response as somehow having priority (which LeMay does not say – his point, if I have it right, is merely to give voice to an interpretation of Bejar’s work that he feels is obscured by a dominant opinion; however, he does feel that regarding Destroyer as cerebral is “missing the point” – this is what I want to argue against.).
In the absence of a canonical view, it makes no sense to say a person’s interpretation is wrong. The creation of an art object includes a multitude of non-reducible, incompatible, intersubjective understandings; therefore, there will necessarily be a number of interpretations that do not jibe with each other, that is, that do not merely disagree about some objective factor that can be figured out by appealing to something – perhaps Bejar himself – but that actually can never be resolved and then fundamentally become part of that art object. Neither and both interpretation are valid on the postmodern model. The question that we are left with then is not built upon ideas of error – which interpretation is correct – but of meaning – which interpretations enrich the experience, which are (pragmatically) helpful based on a certain POV, and so forth. What I want to argue then is that an emotional reading of Rubies, and beyond that Bejar’s other work, makes the experience poorer, more pedestrian, than it would otherwise be.
You might think it’s easy to read Destroyer as simply cerebral, and because it is easy, because he writes his lyrics in a more literary fashion, dolling up the quotidian in pretty party dresses, that’s the reason to ignore the emotional (and what emotional I say?). Ease? There are legitimate reasons why the intellectual interpretations have dominated, why a solely cerebral understanding of the Destroyer oeuvre is primary; these reasons are not based on the literary nature of the lyrics, or rather it would be a mistake to only base it on the literary nature for the actual absence of emotional content comes from the persona Bejar has created with Destroyer. There is distance, a lack of connection that the narrator – presumably the Destroyer character – radiates, something that goes beyond the simple disconnectedness of unfamiliar language: i.e. there are three facets to this 1) strange language automatically creates a rift between ordinary understanding and the song/poem/novel and 2) thematically, the language could create distance between common notions and the ones contained in the art object and 3) the narrator himself could be disconnected from the world he is describing – this third sense is what I mean. Rubies is distant because Destroyer is distant; he is rarely an immediate participant in the proceedings, mostly he remembers or describes, reminisces – past tense; he commands, it is others he lives vicariously through. There is distance and there are attempts to transcend that distance that ultimately fail: “Tabitha takes another stab at becoming light” or “Tall ships made of snow invading the sun”. The distance is sad, sure, a narrator who never lives in the world he narrates – welcome to postmodern fiction (hell, welcome to any piece of art about the loner artist) – that’s kind of sad, but this is a cerebral melancholy. Emotional means visceral – you feel it. Feeling from Rubies comes from the music itself. We feel pop songs. 1-4-5 progressions, the tonic-minor 6ths – these are part of us and on a very basic fundamental level move us. But don’t confuse that for emotion. It’s instinct.
Just because he writes about, as LeMay says “people (usually girls) and places he knows”, that is, just because the subject matter is composed of the usual things that move us – relationships and geography (especially meaningful geography), do not confuse reference and referents. Sure, the things those words refer to, the referents, hold meanings for us, but the words, the act of referring is ultimately empty because there’s too much distance to cover: too much time has passed, and instead we’re left with a persona who stands ironically in relation to the world; thus an emotional understanding is difficult to maintain because we can never breech this stance of the narrator’s and like some noumenal realm, it stands outside of us never to be reached, only to be striven for.
Emotion – real, gut feeling – is tough to come by through Destroyer, and ultimately, the question that needs to be answered is: do we need to search within him to find it? Or rather, rhetorically, the world is full of songs about feeling: either lyrically it is full of feeling, overflowing with emotions or say in free jazz, the music is the emotion, expressed explicitly, concretized, that is, reified for the outside world to behold – with this multitude that makes up what large percentage of music, do we have to create (interpret) more? Can I have my distance? Why reinterpret a perfectly brilliant album so that it falls in line, or in other words, why do we think that emotional content is fundamentally more important than intellectual content?
