I’m frustrated with YouTube. What I’m looking for is a performance by Leonard Cohen, one I haven’t seen before, but on my home page the algorithm is only suggesting things like yoga videos (even though I only watch the same one over and over again) and interviews with Elon Musk (who is the opposite of Leonard Cohen). Searches only return videos and performances I’ve seen before.
The problem might be that I’ve already seen all of his performances, and there just isn’t a new one. But I don’t want to believe that’s true, and so I blame YouTube instead. I try a new search (‘leonard cohen live archives canada’?!) and trawl through the results.
Nothing.
***
Every once in a while, my parents would drive up to visit my older siblings at college. My sister and my two brothers all went to the same university in the Appalachian Mountains, a five-hour drive north from where I grew up on Long Island. Usually, it was just my mom and me. We'd drive up one day, drop off Polish home-cooked meals, and then we'd drive back down the next day.
I'm not precisely sure how often we would actually do this, but I imagine it was once a month. (I was seven or eight at the time, so my concept of time was poor.) The drive was monotonous, we wouldn't make any rest stops, and my mom had one CD in the car that she always listened to, over and over again: The Best of Leonard Cohen.
Leonard Cohen is probably best known for his song ‘Hallelujah’, although the most popular rendition of it is a cover by Jeff Buckley which eventually featured in the movie Shrek. He’s also known for his deep voice, which didn’t start that way but sunk progressively lower with each album. One critic predicted that ‘one day he’d put out an album so subsonic that you'd just feel it, not hear it.’ (Leonard didn’t get there. He died seventeen days after the release of the album that critic was reviewing.)
Leonard had played the guitar since he was fifteen, noticing (according to his biographer Syvlie Simmons) that ‘playing one did not repel girls’—it seemed to do the opposite, in fact. But before Leonard became in any way known for his music, Leonard was a young but celebrated poet and novelist in his twenties. He released his first album (of, eventually, fourteen) at thirty-three.
In the backseat of my mother’s car, my thirties were an impossible eternity away. I could hardly comprehend what it must be like to be twenty—around when you were not only allowed but actively encouraged to move out of the house.
Neither of us spoke in the car much, and I'd stare out the window, daydream, and listen to the music. I didn't really understand Leonard’s lyrics, but the vibe I got was that life is sad and complicated, and the point of art is to express these facts.
This was around the time that I started to write poetry. I'd decided that I wanted to become a writer, which I understood to be a very serious and melancholic profession.
***
On Easter Sunday, my partner and I drove up through flat, cramped, industrial suburbs of Melbourne’s west to visit his parents. Our car stereo was broken, so we were listening to Leonard from our portable Bluetooth speaker on his lap. We were playing some of his mid-career stuff, which has a lot of eighties synth going on, and trying to figure out the key components of a great Leonard Cohen song. We decided that the song generally has to have:
· One (and no more than one) really good line that is sexy, and about love
· One (and no more than one) really good line that is vulgar, and about sex
· One (and no more than one) reference to hard drugs
· Some literary-religious imagery that you (or more specifically, I) won't notice at first because you (I) have realised somewhat late in life that the Bible has a lot of great stories in it, but you (I) haven't had a chance to read it yet
· At least one (and often many) really sick burns against society
· And then the rest just has to be just really good
***
Leonard, of course, played with these and other rules of songwriting all the time, and that's what makes his work so extremely great. But I think the main thing he consistently stuck to was that his songs never actually took themselves that seriously. They always had something funny or even self-effacing in them, sometimes hidden, but more often it's quite overt.
Listening to Leonard Cohen two decades after I was forced to ruminate in my childhood car, has taught me that Leonard wasn't the sad poet par excellence, but instead just someone who had fun playing with words.
The song “Everybody Knows” was released in 1988. It's essentially a protest song, involving some urgent eighties synthesizer and delightful Spanish guitar. His biographer described it as ‘a litany of world-weary wisdom and cynicism’. In the song, which is nearly six minutes long, Leonard repeats the title phrase more than forty times: the lines in the verses mostly all start with ‘everybody knows’ and the chorus is 3x him repeating ‘everybody knows’ and 1x saying ‘that's how it goes’. And although that sounds extremely repetitive and like it would become old really fast, is it extremely great nonetheless? Yes! E.g.:
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
(Ouch!)
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
(Ouch, again!)
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
(To be clear, the boat is society.)
Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you’ve been faithful
Ah, give a night or few
:O
Everybody knows you've been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows
:O !!
Everybody knows that you live forever
Ah, when you've done a line or two
(Leonard! You didn't!)
***
I hadn’t listened to Leonard for about a decade, because I hadn’t been in the mood to force melancholy upon myself. (Listening to sad music in order to be sad was a form of masochism that I enjoyed only as a youth.) But binging on Leonard Cohen now, as opposed to when I was eight and I didn’t get the jokes, has revealed him to be just as funny as he is poetic. Writing, making music, or doing any kind of creative thing is a form of play that's about expectation and surprise. It can be serious, but it shouldn't be torture. Who knew?!
(Leonard did.)
Marta Troicka is a writer and musician interested in art, culture, and technology. As a Masters student at the University of Melbourne, she is researching artistic practice and experience of music in the digital age. She lives and works on unceded Wurundjeri land with her partner and their dog, Butter.