Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (11 page)

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Is Leonard Cohen a Good Singer?

J
ASON
H
OLT

W
hen Leonard Cohen accepted the Juno Award for Best Male Vocalist in 1993 for his album
The Future
(the Junos are like Canada’s Grammys), he was characteristically self-deprecating, saying that “only in Canada” could he have won such an award. This remark evoked his well-known, ironically self-mocking verdict from “Tower of Song” that his voice is
golden
. While few would contest the substantial quality of Cohen’s voice as an artist—that is, his figurative, nonvocal voice—many diehard fans will admit that he’s not the
greatest
singer. Yet it seems reasonable to consider as a live question whether he ranks as a good one, and to explore in the process what it means to have artistic merit in such a role as singing. Though some detractors deny that he sings
at all
much less well, many fans would insist, on the contrary, that he’s not just a good singer, but so much more.

Does it even make sense to consider seriously the notion that Leonard Cohen is a good singer when it seems pretty clear that he himself doesn’t think so? Well, yes. He may not mean it, for one, and even if he does, he could be wrong. It’s not just a matter of his opinion, or ours for that matter. Opinions differ widely on many questions, and Cohen’s singing is no exception: some critics are too harsh, some fans too forgiving. In matters of taste it is often said “To each their own,” and up to a point this is true. Say I like sleeping in, milk in
my coffee, and listening to Leonard Cohen—and you don’t. That’s just fine, and if all people meant by championing or slamming an artist was “I like their work” or “I don’t like their work,” there would be no issue, no dispute. But that’s often not where it stops. Taste tends to assert itself, to vie for dominance. Fandom wants company, and no dissent. Saying that Cohen is a good singer implies not just “I like him” but that
other people
should also so acknowledge him.

Since many fans will be at loggerheads with critics so harsh as to be
anti
-fans, how can we get beyond fandom and anti-fandom to achieve some sort of objectivity? Might we conduct an opinion poll? We could, but mere opinion won’t do, as we’ve seen. Nor is it simply a matter of the numbers, of whether enough people (a majority?) self-identify as “Team Leonard.” If it were a matter of popularity, then [
insert current pop phenom here
] would be better than Mozart, but clearly that’s not so. Popularity determines neither truth nor quality, and supposing otherwise is fallacious, a reasoning error. Citing the fact that Cohen won a Best Male Vocalist Juno Award doesn’t settle the matter either, for we may think—on independent grounds—that someone else should have won instead and that he shouldn’t have been in the running. Because we need a real standard, tackling this problem, the problem of taste, will take us deep into philosophy from the shallows of the most egregious internet debates.

Beforehand, though, we should get a few things straight. When we talk about Cohen’s singing, we should be clear
which
voice we’re talking about: the early baritone (1960s–’70s), or the later bass (1980s–’90s), which are, if both recognizably Cohen, markedly different. The first period extends from
Songs of Leonard Cohen
(1967) through
Recent Songs
(1979), the second roughly from
Various Positions
(1984) to
Ten New Songs
(2001). The he-doesn’t-really-sing complaint applies, if anywhere, to
Dear Heather
(2004) and
Old Ideas
(2012), and we should both forgive him this and dismiss the suggestion that such criticism applies in a similar way to his earlier work. The transition is gradual, but the difference is huge. The early voice has more range and urgency, the later greater richness,
resonance, a gravitas won not from experience or cigarettes alone. Despite such changes, Cohen’s voice admittedly has retained a slightly nasal tone and remained of narrowish range. It’s not a generic voice, by any stretch, not generically beautiful either—it’s way too distinctive for that.

Cohen’s Weight Class

Valid criticisms of Cohen’s voice include its limited range and unconventionality, though more from a pop music than folk perspective. He’s no Sinatra or Callas, to be sure, but it would be woefully unfair to set the bar that high. Good does not imply keeping pace with the great. It also would be unfair of us to judge Frank Sinatra by the standards of opera, or Maria Callas by those of jazz or pop music. Each is a great singer in their own domain or “weight class,” and so too, I suggest, should we judge Leonard Cohen. In evaluating Cohen’s voice, we should consider his weight class, which straddles the divide between folk and popular music. With one foot in each genre, Cohen weighs in—as we knew he would—as a singer-songwriter (for slightly different emphasis, songwriter-singer). Just as we “forgive” Sinatra for not writing songs, or Cole Porter for not being a singer, so too should we “forgive” singer-songwriters for lacking Sinatra’s voice or Porter’s writing chops. Being
good enough
at both is pretty impressive.

Perhaps, then, the question “Is Leonard Cohen a good singer?” isn’t quite right. Maybe the better question, apropos of his Juno Award, would be “Is Cohen a good
vocalist
?” or, even better, vocal
stylist
. One strong influence on Cohen’s musical style is often acknowledged to be the French
chanson
as exemplified by such artists Jacques Brel, where, as David Boucher observes in
Dylan and Cohen
, “the aesthetic sound of the voice determines the excellence of the work; for the
chansonnier
, it is style that matters and not perfect pitch or polished performance” (p. 137). Now the idea
isn’t
that Cohen isn’t a bad singer because he’s not really trying to be a good one. Rather, knocking his voice for being in a particular musical style or tradition will count less as criticism of
Cohen himself and more as a complaint, whether just or prejudicial, about the entire tradition. Still, pigeonholing Cohen as a
chansonnier
seems to sell both him and his voice short. Cohen’s distinctive, personal vocal style inherits from yet transcends folk, blues, country, pop—various traditions.

No discussion of Cohen’s weight class would be complete without ranking him vocally relative to other singer-songwriters. We should note (along with David Hume) that this isn’t mere opining, either, as such ranking can be an entirely objective matter where any dissent wouldn’t be taken too seriously (pp. 40–41), as in the case of someone’s hyperfandom moving them to proclaim [
insert current action movie star
] a better actor than Laurence Olivier. Among other singer-songwriters, it seems fair to see Cohen somewhere in the middle of the vocal quality spectrum, ranking below a Paul Simon but above a Bob Dylan; for a Canadian trifecta, let’s substitute Gordon Lightfoot above and Neil Young below. Remember that as singer-songwriters, those tending toward the bottom of the vocal spectrum still have mediocre voices, which by implication means those like Cohen above are in the better-than-mediocre category: in other words, good.

Consider now what I’d like to call the great singer-songwriter argument, which goes something like this. Because being a singer-songwriter depends on two very different skill sets, such status implies a basic level of competence in both domains. In other words, you can’t even
be
a singer-songwriter without being dually capable of writing songs as well as singing them. By extension, how highly one rates as a singer-songwriter has implications for singing and songwriting ability. An excellent singer might be a lousy singer-songwriter, but just as a great hunter-gatherer has to be a pretty good hunter
and
a pretty good gatherer—though not necessarily supreme in either—so too must a
great
singer-songwriter be, at the very least, a pretty good singer, even if, as with Cohen, the songwriting appears superior to the singing and allows us to forgive imperfections in the latter. In a nutshell, then, the argument is that because Cohen is a
great
singer-songwriter, he also, by implication, counts as at least
a decent singer. Although Bob Dylan is unquestionably a great songwriter, one could argue, by contrast, that his voice limits his singer-songwriter rank to something short of great, the upper echelons of good.

Style Prejudice

When we consider the role of experts in guiding our aesthetic choices, we naturally think of popular types of criticism: movie critics, food critics, literary critics, music critics. Although today’s internet culture fosters what we may kindly call “democratic” approaches to criticism, where everyone’s keen to assert their own taste alone, and it’s always open season on anyone and anything, most of us still incline toward respect for certain expert critics. Good critics are able to discern, better than others, the qualities that make art—whether we’re talking about a film, a singer, what have you—good, or worthy of attention. Being in a position to make those aesthetic judgments requires perceiving and responding to the relevant features of a variety of different examples, and doing so impartially (or, as David Hume put it, having a “strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice,” p. 44).

That we should be “cleared of all prejudice” is something we should remind about 95 percent of all internet commentators. We sometimes associate such critical harshness, whether we find it on the internet or elsewhere, with justified opinion if not expertise. But such harshness can often conceal underlying prejudice. Take the following pre-internet pronouncement from critic Juan Rodriguez: “Although Cohen may have a private affinity for the vitality, ease and emotive qualities of pop music at its best . . . this does not automatically provide him with the talent to sing. Cohen plainly cannot sing. His voice is dull and monotonous and has little range” (p. 67). This reads like the sentence of a pretty uncompromising judge, who would be similarly tough assessing others and whose apparently principled stance commands our respect. However, the critic’s evaluation unfolds rather
surprisingly: “Bob Dylan, on the other hand, does know how to sing and he makes his own rough and unsweet voice an attribute, not a liability. Unfortunately, Cohen has been able to do nothing with his voice and this fact turns up in his melodies, which are slow, deadeningly similar, and wholly uninspiring.” Ouch; the sting of it isn’t the point, though. Rather, with this unexpected turn the critic has lost, maybe not all, but most of us. Whatever we might think of the relative merits of the two voices, they’re not
that
different in terms of aesthetic judgment, not night-and-day different.

This passage also illustrates a significant and usually unacknowledged source of many negative impressions of Cohen as a singer:
style prejudice
. A lot of people simply don’t like his style, any part of it, the way Cohen dresses, his poet-polished lyrics, his aesthetic sensibility, the ironic tone and dark, existential mood of many of his songs. Notice how the critic above linked what he dislikes about Cohen’s voice with his dislike of the music itself, suggesting that melodic “disappointment” somehow reveals vocal inadequacy. Some don’t like the romanticism, others the realism, others still the combination. To gloss any of these dislikes as “vocal inadequacy” is simply what philosophers call a category-mistake: a mis-attribution error. People who dismiss his singing are sometimes no more forgiving of more generically approved singers’ covers (as with Jennifer Warnes’s
Famous Blue Raincoat
tribute album), which indicates the issue isn’t really Cohen’s singing so much as the songs themselves. Preferring a cover to a Cohen original might also, but also might not, betray a style prejudice.