Music: You Want It Darker?

Originally published in Sharp. Read the full text here.

How Should We Understand Leonard Cohen's Legacy in the #Metoo Era?

About a year ago,  a friend who, like me, is a huge Leonard Cohen fan, confessed that she’d had a terrible thought: “Thank God Leonard Cohen is dead.” I told her I’d often had the same sentiment. To understand why a Cohen devotee would harbour such feelings, you have to appreciate just how important Cohen is to the people who revere him and how defensive we can get about his legacy.

His life — which began in 1934 and ended on the eve of the 2016 U.S. election — was a tribute to the human capacity for self-invention. In his twenties, Cohen was a poet and experimental novelist. A decade later, he was one of the world’s most distinctive singer-songwriters, having recorded a suite of minimalist folk records with gnomic lyrics. By middle age, he had pioneered a new genre of synth-heavy spiritual pop — liturgical music for secular people who still wanted to infuse their lives with a sense of the divine.

Posthumously, Cohen has been reinvented again. Today, as the second anniversary of his death nears, he has become to his native Montreal what Elvis Presley is to Memphis and Eva Perón is to Buenos Aires: a demigod or patron saint. “Based on how Montrealers are now venerating Leonard Cohen,” Robert Sarner argues in the Times of Israel, “it may be only a matter of time before Saint Leonard appears on local city maps.” His handsome, recognizably Semitic face already graces postcards, billboards, and murals. It is as iconic as the crucifix atop the mountain in the centre of town.

The campaign to canonize Cohen hasn’t stopped there. A memorial concert on the first anniversary of his death featured heartfelt performances from Elvis Costello, Sting, and Lana del Rey. Penguin Random House recently published a collection of his poems, some of them outtakes from his notebook. The dance company Ballet Jazz Montreal has been touring a production set to Cohen’s music. And, following an extended run at the Contemporary Art Museum of Montreal, the show “Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything” will be hitting the road, perhaps until 2022. Cohen is dead, but the Cohen moment is just beginning. He may be more beloved today than he’s ever been.

I caught the gallery show in 2017 and was impressed by the variety of work, particularly Candice Breitz’s video installation in which an 18-person choir joyously belts out a full Cohen album, and Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s sculpture “The Poetry Machine,” a vintage organ on which each key plays a spoken line of Cohen’s poetry. The exhibition captures its namesake’s many identities: Cohen the Jew, Buddhist, depressive, guru, balladeer, pop star, classicist, painter, and poet. If there’s one persona that perhaps got insufficient attention, it’s the one you might charitably call Cohen the Libertine — or, if you’re feeling less charitable, Cohen the Misogynist.

Is this a harsh charge? Perhaps, although there was a time when it was frequently levelled at Cohen. The main criticism is that, in his writing, he treated women as set pieces: young ingenues or tragic seductresses. His many love affairs were the stuff of legend. So too were his failed relationships. For fans, his romantic and sexual exploits were a source of fascination, but for those who didn’t buy the act, he could seem like any other caddish, entitled man.

If people are hesitant to use such strong language today, it is probably because they feel guilty speaking ill of the dead. Novelist Anakana Schofield recently made this point in one of the few harsh essays on Cohen that’s been published in the last two years: “Be very careful challenging opinion on Leonard Cohen. It’s like bringing up someone’s ex-partner with a mistaken warm smile on your face.”

This perhaps wouldn’t be the case had Cohen lived past his 82 years, long enough to witness the election of Donald Trump, the fall of Harvey Weinstein, and the public reckoning about types of misbehaviour we’re no longer willing to put up with. The #MeToo moment isn’t only about sexual misconduct; it’s also about how a certain kind of male persona — the one we’ve variously called the player, the libertine, or the lothario — created cultural expectations about how men might be permitted to act and what women should be expected to tolerate. Would Cohen, who, at times, embodied the lothario identity, have survived such a reckoning? Or would he have faced uncomfortable questions about his art and legacy?

Most of us have a need — morally indefensible yet all too human — to not see our heroes get taken down. And Cohen is, for me, the ultimate hero, a man who defined what it means to be both a Jew and a humanist in the world today. There isn’t a single Hebrew or Aramaic prayer that binds me to my Jewish identity as strongly as Cohen’s lyrics do. And so, like my friend, I feel a guilty sense of relief when I consider that, by dying when he did, Cohen saved us all an awkward conversation.

But the reckoning may be coming anyway. Although the dead get a temporary pass, they aren’t immune from criticism forever. Plus, to whitewash Cohen’s legacy is to self-censor, and Cohen opposed censorship in all its many forms. An honest look at him would acknowledge those aspects of his persona that, when seen from the vantage point of 2018, don’t hold up so well. It would also acknowledge that these same elements made him compelling and groundbreaking. They are as essential to his controversy as they are to his charisma and his art. We must find a way to hold all of these thoughts in our heads.

This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.