Leonard's Confused Politics

Last night, after listening to Johnny Cash forever, I played Leonard Cohen until it was time to go to bed. For me, like the Caesar's Wife, Leonard is above suspicion. Or critique. Or whatever. But I have always been fascinated by the moral system created in his songs. And Leonard has very weird politics, from what one can infer from textual analysis of the lyrics. As everybody knows (heh), I am obsessed with lyrics, it's the first thing I focus on in songs, and I love it when a singer/songwriter creates song narratives that make me feel a visceral emotion, but can't really be conveyed with any synonyms or metaphores because they are already a somewhat dadaist web of secondary synonyms or metaphores, or because the meaning is transmitted in fragments, because they don't make complete articulated sense; I sense truth, but can't rephrase it as logic. One of my favorite Leonard songs is "Famous Blue Raincoat" which I have listened to hunderds of times, but I still couldn't tell you exactly what transpires in the story that the song implies. It's like looking into a dark room, strategically spotlighted in places, so that a few contours are visible, the room is teasing with its presence, and daring you to create synecdoche after synecdoche to speculate about what is stored there. Hence the multiplicity of meanings. So, lots of Leonard songs have vague angst or doom in them, it's not clear where it's coming from or who it is directed at, but the listener is necessarily hailed by it along the way.

One of the most pleasant musical moments I have had all year was when I went to that Leonard Cohen tribute concert in Prospect Park this summer. There were lots of amazing moments. There was a Rufus Wainwright/Nick Cave duet. There was a comment before the performance of "The Future" about how we are living in the apocalyptic world of that song today. There was Rufus, coming up on stage to perform "Everybody Knows" and saying that in honor of the Supreme Court Ruling about sodomy he was going to "fag it up" and delivering a stylin' disco-ish rendition of everyone's favorite teen rebellion hymn from "Pump Up The Volume." But my favorite part came when they were covering "Anthem" which I like but had never been one of my favorites, but there is a verse that goes: "I can't run no more / With this lawless crowd / While the killers in high places / Say their prayers out loud" and EVERYONE spontaneously cheered. Like at a demonstration. Like some sort of crowd unity moment in the best sense possible. So all this is to illustrate that Leonard's got some good politics. Or some clay base from which good politics can be sculpted. He rails against oppression, but does it in an Old-Testament kind of way (the lines following the aforementioned quote go in an especially low boom: "But they've summonned, they've summonned a thundercloud / and they're going to hear from me," especially considering that the war/peace prognosis in the song is symbolized by the Holy Dove (gendered as female)). There are some ambiguous songs, like "Democracy" which have some odd moments, but overall, I believe, are written as sarcastic indictments of the Potemkin Villages version of democracy we are living in. And also, contextually, Leonard is loved by the left, by artists and writers who are usually positioned left of the political meridian. Then what's with "The Future" that groups together crack, anal sex, abortion and environmental destruction in one snowball of Leonard's grievances with the world? Also, who exactly is narrating that song? Why is Leonard prone to positioning himself alternately as a prophet, as "Field Commander Cohen" and as a singer persecuted for his "voice"? Is it just some general-domain Byronesque tendency? There is lots of Biblical stuff all over the place in his songs, but it's Old Testament, now New, which points to a Baroque aesthetic (see his live performance of "Hallelujah") than to a religious fervor. And, of course, there is the whole epicurean ethos, because Boogie Street which Leonard inhabits is a place of boozing and dramatic lovemaking. As nuncstans once put it, Leonard is a dirty old man, but he is a cool dirty old man. But I don't know how much Leonard connects the whole erotic dimension with some conceptual "freedom" that he seems to long for in his songs--it seems like the ghosts of love and sex he sings about are detours on the road to some sort of creative liberation, some trenches that he gets bogged down in, and no one can understand him except someone very much like him, which in his case happens to be Janis Joplin, about whom he wrote "Chelsea Hotel #2." So even his hedonistic impulses are complicating, rather than liberating. And yet he is, like, the opposite of repression and sublimation. And he is that way about the state of the world as well. Leonard sees the world as needing improvement in ways that I would deeply agree with, and sometimes Old Testament metaphores are the most apt ones. There is a Wilfred Owen (one of the World War One poets, like Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon) who "re-wrote" the story of Abraham and Isaac while in the trenches awaiting mustard gas attacks:
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went / And took the fire with him, and a knife... When lo! an angel called him out of heaven, / Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad, Neither do anything to him. / Behold, A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns; / Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him. / But the old man would not so, but slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Basically, the thing that trips me up about Leonard at the moment, is that a song like "Anthem" could be appropriated by anti-war protestors and Dubya with equal ease. And they would both think that the song was written especially for their cause.