Destroyer: "Times Square"
Dan Bejar is a curmudgeon, or at least he wants us to think so. There are three versions of “Times Square” on Poison Season: the elegiac opener is all tenderness, the dramatic, string-laden closer all tension. In between is a romp straight out of 1975: Young Americans, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Coney Island Baby. To Bejar’s disdain, this is the original incarnation. “It’s a straight-ahead song in a lot of ways,” he said in our recent interview. “But that’s why it couldn’t just be that version of the song on the record. I really despise pop music these days, so I can’t have people walking away humming songs.”
It’d probably be more in Bejar’s nature to refer to the gaudy tourist hellhole by its former nickname, Thieves’ Lair. But just like any out-of-towner faced with the New York skyline for the first time, he’s powerless to deny the romance of the cinematic made real. This arrangement—busy guitar solo, dreamy lounge sax—revels in the rapturous possibility of big city movies, and fully succumbs to the counterintuitive seduction of commerce as spectacular. Against Bejar’s best intentions, “Times Square” is a transcendent pop song about pop’s abiding, unwitting allure.
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