TWO OF THE most celebrated singer/songwriter/poets of the 20th and 21st centuries are Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.
While there are, of course, many other celebrated singer/songwriters who are not Jewish, it does seem, if one casts one’s mind back over the composers/songwriters roll call of the last century (Harold Arlen, Burt Bacharach, The Bernsteins, Sammy Cahn, Jerry Goldsmith, Lorenz Hart, Janis Ian, Jerome Kern, Carole King, Lalo Schifrin, Phil Spector, Mel Tormé, Kurt Weill, Amy Winehouse etc…) that there is a definite Jewish-Showbiz gene.
Perhaps it is because of the need for identity so instilled by their history of homelessness.
Leonard Cohen, in particular, is wont to draw on his Jewish roots and copious biblical references to invest his songs with meaning which is uniquely enigmatic and universal the same time.
The rain falls down on last year’s man
that’s a Jews’s harp on the table,
that’s a crayon in his hand.
These are the final days,
this is the darkness, this is the flood.
But Leonard Cohen’s songs cover the whole range of human experience, with or without inspiration from his racial/religious heritage. Birth, love, sex, joy, depression, politics, children, life, death; it’s all there. And written in a deceptively simple style which is instantly accessible yet which stays in your mind for long afterwards. He never uses a long word if there is a short one with the same meaning and yet he seems to convey complex human experiences that touch a nerve in everyone regardless of their backgrounds.
My son and my daughter
climbed out of the water
saying “Papa you promised to play”
And they lead you away
to that great surprise
and it’s “Papa don’t peep,
Papa cover your eyes”
and they hide, they hide
in the world.
Visual metaphors are one of Cohen’s strong points. They produce a feeling rather than an image and they are the strongest parts of his lyrics.
Well I’ve been where you’re hanging
I think I can see how you’re pinned
When you’re not feeling holy
you’re loneliness says that you’ve sinned
Admitting that, as a young man (and still to this day if the evidence is correct) he found that poetry won him the attention from girls he was otherwise lacking, Cohen is the master of the truly meaningful love song in an age when commercial pop has savagely downgraded this genre for the fastest rate of return.
Once there was a path and a girl with chestnut hair
and you spent summers picking all of the berries that grew there
There were times she was a woman, there were times she was just a child
and you held her in shadows where the raspberries grow wild.
And his political sensibilities have been sharpened by his own sense of impending doom.
Give me crack and anal sex,
take the only tree that’s left
and stuff it up the hole in your culture.
Give me back the Berlin Wall,
give me Stalin and Saint Paul,
I’ve seen the future, brother: it is murder.
Leonard Cohen’s voice has tragically crumbled over the years, due to too much smoking, so that he is mostly simply reciting the words along to accompaniment by his backing singers, but the words and arrangements (all self-produced) are all electrifying and serve to galvanise the attention on the words and the meaning.
Apparently though, he still finds it within him to let rip and reach the higher notes during his live performances as he did during this Street Festival in Toronto two years ago:
And he does actually have a message of comfort for all you entrepreneurs out there:
I greet you from the other side
Of sorrow and despair
With a love so vast and shattered
It will reach you everywhere
And I sing this for the captain
Whose ship has not been built
For the mother in confusion
Her cradle still unfilled
For the heart with no companion
For the soul without a king
For the prima ballerina
Who cannot dance to anything
But in the end, he does admit that he knows as little as the rest of us about life, the universe and everything.
And no-one knows where the night is going
An no-one knows why the wine is flowing
Oh love, I need you, I need you, I need you,
I need you now, I need you now.
And all this is because I am going to see the great man himself tonight at the O2 Arena. The last time I saw him was back in 1979. At his last round of concerts in the UK, in July, he said “The last time I was here was ten years ago when I was sixty. A crazy kid with a crazy dream.” Oh yes, it’s going to be great night!
And it doesn’t matter if you’re not Jewish.
