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Authors: Jason Holt

Tags: #Philosophy, #Essays, #Music, #Individual Composer & Musician, #Poetry, #Canadian

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All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC., 424 Church Street,

Nashville, TN 37219. All rights reserved.

Used by permission.

VILLANELLE FOR OUR TIME

Written by Leonard Cohen & Frank Scott © 2004 Old Ideas LLC & Publisher(s) Unknown

All rights on behalf of Old Ideas LLC administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC., 424 Church Street, Nashville, TN 37219. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

WAITING FOR THE MIRACLE

Written by Leonard Cohen & Sharon Robinson © 1992 Sony/ATV Songs LLC & Publisher(s) Unknown

All rights on behalf of Sony/ATV Songs LLC administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC., 424 Church Street, Nashville, TN 37219. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

WHO BY FIRE

Written by Leonard Cohen

© 1974 Sony/ATV Songs LLC

All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC., 424 Church Street,

Nashville, TN 37219. All rights reserved.

Used by permission.

Excerpts also from
Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs
by Leonard Cohen. Copyright © 1993 Leonard Cohen. Reprinted by permission of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company.

YOU KNOW WHO I AM

Written by Leonard Cohen

© 1969 Sony/ATV Songs LLC

All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC., 424 Church Street,

Nashville, TN 37219. All rights reserved.

Used by permission.

Excerpts also from
Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs
by Leonard Cohen. Copyright © 1993 Leonard Cohen. Reprinted by permission of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company.

The Pop Star–Poet Paradox

J
ASON
H
OLT

T
here seems to be a contradiction between Leonard Cohen the pop star and Leonard Cohen the poet. The pop star was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; the poet refused Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Literary Award. On some level, these two facets don’t seem to go together, as if Cohen has a split artistic personality. Think of his portrait on the
Recent Songs
album cover (1979): the two bilateral halves, put together, do look like him, although the face is noticeably asymmetrical. No stranger to tension and duality, “the stranger” appears particularly tailor-suited to such visual representation.

There’s nothing altogether unusual about starting out in one line and shifting later to another. From a certain point of view, that’s in fact what Cohen did. He started out as a poet, a worker in literature, and then became primarily a worker in song. Nor is there anything strange about a musician publishing poetry. Plenty of popular musicians have done so: Jim Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Jewel, Tupac Shakur. Others, like Patti Smith and Jim Carroll, have achieved a notable presence as poets and even some critical cachet. It is, though, clear enough, if not entirely uncontroversial, that Leonard Cohen ranks supreme as the quintessential pop star–poet. We can leave aside the related issue of the poetics of popular song lyrics—the
metrical appeal of Chuck Berry, for instance—or including spoken word pieces on albums à la Ani DiFranco.

Preeminence as a pop star–poet is only one of many things that make Leonard Cohen a paradoxical figure, one of the most enigmatic, mysterious, and compelling in all of pop music. He’s a
Canadian
, of all things, but with international appeal. Cohen is utterly depressing, but wickedly funny. He’s deadly serious, but somehow above it all, lighthearted; nostalgic and yet hopeful; hopeful but resigned; unremittingly cruel, yet undeniably gentle; unblinkingly realistic, yet almost blindly romantic; a Jew but seemingly Christian; Judeo-Christian but Buddhist. He speaks eloquently of silence, and his silence speaks volumes, illuminating darkness even as it swallows up the light. He shouldn’t be—but somehow is—so much fun.

These tensions, these dualities are paradoxes only in a mild sense. A more strict sense limits paradoxes to apparently inescapable, genuine contradictions—where it seems logically impossible to have both things at once, and yet it seems we do have them. To take a common example, if I write “This sentence is false,” that’s paradoxical because assuming it’s true (the world is as the sentence says), then it’s false, and if it’s false (the world isn’t so), then it’s true. It’s not just in the mild sense that Leonard Cohen is paradoxical. He’s also paradoxical in the stricter sense. The pop star–poet paradox isn’t that Cohen writes poetry and popular music, but rather that his songs count
both
as poetry
and
as popular music.

Why is this a paradox? There’s a presumed hard distinction between so-called high and popular art. Where poetry is a high art, folk or pop music is deemed a popular art, lower if not lowbrow. Actually, any art form will have highbrow and popular varieties. Music, for instance, has both highbrow varieties (classical, opera), and less “refined” popular types (country, rock). Poetry, too, may be seen as having comparatively popular varieties like rap alongside its more rarefied, and to popular tastes often less engaging, traditional examples: Drake and Blake. It’s not just philosophers, but most of us, who consider the distinction absolute in that any artwork
will count
either
as high art
or
as popular entertainment—
but never both
.

We can now see the potential paradox in the music of Leonard Cohen. It’s not simply a matter of setting poetry to music, although that sometimes was the process, but the fact that the songs themselves count both as traditional poetry (high art) and folk or pop music (popular art). From a poetic perspective, Cohen’s songs are unquestionably a cut above—too good, in a way, for popular music. Still, folk and pop, Cohen’s musical genres, are
decidedly
popular. Cohen’s songs appear to transcend and yet still remain within the genres they inhabit.

Film theorists sometimes appeal to something called “auteur theory” to explain how in some cases movies, a typically popular art form, can be transformed into high art when a great filmmaker expresses a singular vision. In the films of Alfred Hitchcock, for instance, we have popular movie genres—the thriller, the horror, the film noir—elevated beyond the confines of more generic examples. Similar to a literary author (
auteur
), the creative control and exacting standards of the genius filmmaker allow them to make high art out of what, in ordinary hands, would be merely popular art. In such cases, the label “popular art,” however popular the work itself may be, is effectively inapplicable.

We might think of resolving the pop star–poet paradox for Cohen by thinking that he’s also an auteur—and not just because he’s literally an author—that he transcends the limits of folk and pop music to create high art out of popular material (see Boucher’s book,
Dylan and Cohen,
pp. 75–77), just as Hitchcock does with the thriller. That’s one possibility. Here’s another: though the poetry of Cohen’s songs makes them high art, the musical profiles of these songs don’t allow them any supra-popular transubstantiation. They’re folk, or pop, glorious but not transcendent. Perhaps this is unlike Hitchcock, though perhaps here too the paradox that auteur theory seems to help resolve remains intact.

Either way, in Leonard Cohen’s music we find a challenge to the distinction between high and popular art. Witness the
fact that, on this distinction, the undeniable high art of the lyrics as poetry gets somehow “degraded” by
adding
to it aesthetically pleasing melody: a paradox of literary lyrics. We’d hardly agree with Louis Dudek, an early literary mentor of Cohen, who thought that his taking up the guitar was somehow throwing away his talent, a betrayal of poetry. The two are perfect complements, as everybody knows.

1

Leonard Cohen as a Guide to Life

B
RENDAN
S
HEA

To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die.

—C
ICERO

When asked to describe what separates Leonard Cohen’s songs from those of other singer-songwriters, many of his fans might be tempted to say “he’s more philosophical.” And this is surely right—after all, this is a book on Leonard Cohen and philosophy!

Cohen’s songs resonate with so many of us because they focus on profoundly important human themes such as the nature of love, sex, death, and what makes for a meaningful life. An influential group of ancient Greek philosophers who lived during the period from 300 BCE to 200 CE sought to answer questions related to these same themes. The three major “schools” of Greek philosophy during this period, known as
Hellenistic
philosophy, included the Stoics, the Skeptics, and the Epicureans. The philosophers in these different schools don’t always agree with each other (or with Cohen) on the nature of the problems or their solutions.

A Philosopher Must Die

For if you kill me you will not easily find a successor to me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly,
given to the state by God; and the state is a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you.

             
—S
OCRATES
(
Apology
, section 30e)

In “A Singer Must Die,” Cohen writes from the perspective of a singer who has been accused of betraying with “the lie in his voice.” The singer offers a sarcastic apology, thanking his accusers for doing their duty as “keepers of truth” and “guardians of beauty.” He goes on to consider his own complex motivations for writing his songs, which are tightly tied up with his human desire for sex and love. He concludes with a more direct attack on the motives and methods of the government, which often tries to suppress this sort of art with a “knee in your balls” and “fist in your face.”

The conflict between the democratic state and the individual seeker of truth has a long history, and one of its earliest victims, Socrates, served as something like a secular “saint” to Hellenistic philosophers. Socrates (469 to 399 BCE) was a citizen of Athens, the birthplace of modern democracy. Most of what we know about Socrates is due to his equally famous student, the philosopher Plato (427 to 347 BCE). Socrates was by all accounts a loyal citizen, who served bravely in the military and devoted his life to determining how one could live a virtuous, happy life. He most commonly did this by approaching important Athenians and asking them to describe and defend their answers to “big questions” about subjects such as justice, religion, and love. Like Cohen’s character in “Chelsea Hotel #2,” Socrates was at once known as a sex object (the young men of Athens often made unsuccessful passes at him) and as a somewhat ugly man (Plato’s dialogues contain frequent jokes about the shape of Socrates’s nose).

Socrates’s habit of acting like a “gadfly” who annoyed the rich and powerful earned him enemies, however, and he soon
found himself in the same situation as Cohen’s singer. Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth and denying the gods of the state. His (often sarcastic) defense was in many ways similar to the one described by Cohen. He argued that he was driven to seek the truth (though he claimed to never have found it) by an inner “daemon” he could not and would not control, and said that his accusers ought to thank him for his service to the city. Socrates argued that it would be better to die than to do what he thought wrong, since only the latter harms the soul. In a famous miscarriage of justice, the jury voted to convict Socrates and sentenced him to death.

BOOK: Leonard Cohen and Philosophy
12.87Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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