A singer must die

[sabotabby]

Nearly immediately after I learned of Leonard Cohen's death—while it was an inevitability for which I'd been steeling myself for months—I was whisked off to a weekend-long union thing, and haven't been able to so much as crack open my laptop in the past 72 hours or so. I've had access to Facebook and such, but I've been in passive reception mode, squinting at news, and poems, and song lyrics, and links to videos through the tiny screen of my cell phone in between sitting still and watching PowerPoint after PowerPoint. I was, to be fair, surrounded by a good number of people also mourning Leonard Cohen, but unlike the deaths of most famous people, this is an intensely personal grief that needs to be written, not spoken. Tributes to Leonard Cohen are really best written with a cigarette dangling out of one's mouth in the Chelsea Hotel while a kohl-eyed girl drowsily calls your name from the unmade bed, and anyway, I don't even smoke.

Which is to say that I haven't been in an environment that's been particularly conducive to collecting all of my thoughts, let alone writing them down.

When an artist dies at 82, having accrued international fame and reknown, amassed a body of work near-universally acknowledged as genius, it's a cause for celebration rather than mourning, but fuck it, I'm sad. Leonard Cohen is one of my earliest musical memories— maybe my earliest one. Unlike so many kids, I didn't rebel against the music my parents listened to, because it was "Suzanne" and "So Long Marianne" and "That's No Way To Say Goodbye" and "Chelsea Hotel" and "Famous Blue Raincoat" that my mother played, on the tape deck, to the point where we had to routinely rewind the exhausted plastic with a pen. It was his songs that I painstakingly tried to pluck out on piano or strum on guitar, his poems and novels in tattered books that I brought into my English classes, and later, when I was a teenager, his songs that inspired the rest of the music I'd grow to love.

There's a transcendence to Cohen's poetry, and that's why so much of the world is grieving just like me. He tapped into something dark and primal and sultry and seductive, these bleak and rich songs of sex and death and God and longing. But there's also an intense specificity. It's the words and music of a particular milieu, the cultural fabric of 60s and 70s Jewish Montreal that is in my DNA, even though I wasn't born yet, or born there. It's not just that Cohen was brilliant, but he was ours, by far the greatest poet and songwriter to come out of this country, from the same strange, haunted corner of it as my own family.

The world is hell right now, and threatening to descend into an even deeper, unimaginable hell, and there are so many things to mourn. But thank you, Mr. Cohen. I'll have your music to help me survive it.

Comments

One more thing

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

Cohen wasn't my poet the way he was yours, but I held his work in considerable affection and greater esteem. (And, I should check out his novels, shouldn't I?)

When it comes to celebrating his life, I think it's worth adding he went out very shortly after releasing a final record, which is more than most artists are lucky enough to achieve. (I'm reminded of another Montreal Jew, Mordecai Richler, whose last novel, Barney's Version, might have been his best.)

P.S. I'm listening to You Want It Darker as I type this, and I think I might need to cry a little in a minute.

Re: One more thing

[sabotabby]

And an album, at that, which is essentially one long, "I'm about to die and I'm okay with that" statement.

Fun fact about what an emotional lightweight I am: I have not yet managed to listen to You Want It Darker from beginning to end yet, despite the fact that, like, I bought it and stuff. I've been listening to his older stuff all day, though, while baking chocolate chip cookies.

Re: One more thing

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

I think that's absolutely legitimate. He had time to prepare himself; you only found out on Thursday. (When you're ready, I think you'll like).

And I can confirm that it's all about his upcoming demise. It's pretty damned audacious, now I think of it, to write (and record) your own damned elegy. Never let it be said that the man "born with the gift of a golden voice" didn't have a sense of humour.

Re: One more thing

[sabotabby]

I've loved what I've heard so far.

No one else would have the right words to eulogize him! I certainly don't.

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

...fuck this year. Leon Russell died today.

[sabotabby]

I had admittedly not heard of him until just now, but yeah, this year.

[firecat]

Thank you for this beautiful tribute.

[sabotabby]

Thanks for reading it!

[rdi.livejournal.com]

"Tributes to Leonard Cohen are really best written with a cigarette dangling out of one's mouth in the Chelsea Hotel while a kohl-eyed girl drowsily calls your name from the unmade bed, and anyway, I don't even smoke.”

I love this sentence. Love your whole post, but this sentence in particular.

I like your observation on milieu, as well. There are things specifically Jewish and 60s and 70s and Montreal about Cohen and it’s a milieu I wish I knew better. My family lived in Laval from 67-71, and my older siblings have more memories of Montreal than I do.

[sabotabby]

Trufax: When I first went to New York, I was disappointed that it was not more like a Leonard Cohen song.

Montreal stayed that way a lot longer, I think.

[50-ft-queenie.livejournal.com]

I'm heartbroken. Yes, he was 82 and that's a good long life and we're still allowed to be sad, damn it. Also, the timing couldn't have been worse. In a year where we've lost so many great artists, and in the same week that racist cheeto got elected, we lost Cohen. It's just cruel.

[sabotabby]

Right? I'd still be sad if he died at 102, but why can't we have four more years of Cohen instead of four years of the racist cheeto?