Goin' Cohen Forget Dylan. Leonard Cohen is our generations Bard.[/color]
By Jeffrey Barg Posted May. 12, 2009
Bob Dylan, with his looping rhetorical flourishes and enigmatic turns of phrase, is most often called a contemporary Shakespeare. How lucky we are, we’re told, to be living at the same time as our generation’s Bard.
Which is a goddamn travesty. Because it’s not Dylan but Leonard Cohen who’s the true poetic heir to Shakespeare’s gift.
It’s only because 21st-century minds aren’t used to Big Willie’s style that we think his poetic turns of phrase are abstruse. Unlike Dylan, Shakespeare spoke truth with lines that were straightforward and direct, with zero ambiguity: “All the world’s a stage,” “To be or not to be,” “To thine own self be true.” They spoke in language the commoners could understand; only with the ensuing vernacular change of the next 400 years did it become what high school students around the world now trip over.
In other words, it was less “Don't wanna be a bum, you better chew gum, the pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handles”; more “My friends are gone and my hair is gray, I ache in the places I used to play.” Which one can you divine the meaning of faster? How Shakespeare’s contemporaries heard his plays is how we hear Leonard Cohen’s songs: simple, straightforward and true.
And that’s without even seeing any of it performed.
Watch Bob Dylan play live, and then compare it to Leonard Cohen. Where Dylan looks bored, Cohen looks pensive. Dylan’s expression is unchanging, while the craquelure in Cohen’s face betrays unfathomable depth with each phrase. Bob Dylan, though a great lyricist, has never been known as much of a singer or performer. He mumbles; he rambles; on any given night you may or may not be able to understand a single word he sings. Watching Leonard Cohen sing, on the other hand, can break your heart. When he cries of despair and nothingness, it’s the harshest reminder that nothing will come of nothing.
What’s most confounding of all is how the more we learn about Leonard Cohen, the more human he seems. 2005’s doc Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man was especially revelatory for a performer who’s shied away from the spotlight for so much of his career. Interviews with friends, famous musical admirers and the man himself peeled back layer upon layer of a man who’s deeply flawed, troubled, haunted and ultimately kind of a loser. Just like the rest of us.
“We somehow embrace the notion that this veil of tears, that it’s perfectable, that you’re going to get it all straight,” he says in the tellingly naked documentary. “I’ve found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win.”
Even in a film whose title bears his name, Cohen himself is relatively absent. In a way fitting for an artist whose covered songs are as well known as his original versions, most of the screen time is devoted to artists like Rufus and Martha Wainwright, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, and U2. We get little snippets here and there—he’ll work on a single song for a year—but none as revelatory as the end of the film, when he joins U2 for a searing rendition of “Tower of Song.” It makes you realize the only way to learn more about this terse, troubled soul is to see him perform. Now, with his first American tour in 15 years, we can get down in the gritty on his level.
Part of his enigma is the way he embodies this wretched baseness and elder folk statesman/poet laureate status all at once. His recent Live in London DVD shows the man bathed in blue, with a dark fedora matching his pinstriped suit—he looks kind of like he’s headed to the world’s classiest shiva. And once he gets there, he’ll singlehandedly depress the hell out of everyone. (No small feat.) Then, as his dress embodies class, he sings about topics that would make Prince blush. “My words fly up,” Hamlet said, “my thoughts remain below.”
Better than a shiva, this late-career victory lap brings him to the Academy of Music this week. (Only the classiest for the last of the great troubadours.) With last month’s stint at Coachella, it feels kind of like Tony Bennett’s resurgence in the ’90s, only with less infantile pandering to the young’uns. (Remember Bennett’s stint on MTV Unplugged? If Cohen did that, he’d at least have the dignity to acknowledge that “unplugged” was business as usual for much longer than MTV has existed.)
Cohen doesn’t need a comeback and doesn’t ask for mercy: The losers never hit it in the first place, especially where the quality of mercy is not strained.
