I'm Your Recent Future Positions
As you know, I operate in a kind of time lag. I can’t comment on things as they happen. Sometimes it takes me a few days, sometimes a few years, but I guarantee that everything I report is a genuine thought from my head. This is called “reflection” and “analysis” and it is what I do to drive the girls wild. Today, like Entertainment Weekly, I’d like to uncork a few once-timely thoughts on music.
In fall 2001, the hubbub in the music world was over the new records of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, or at least it should have been. Now that Mr. Cohen has come out with an even newer recording, something about a girl named Jennifer or Michelle, it’s time to discuss the once-new Cohen album, entitled “Who I’ve Been Sleeping With Lately” (bowdlerized for the American market as “Ten New Songs”), which in due course I’ll compare unfavorably with Dylan’s “Love and Theft”.
The feeling on Cohen’s silver disc is that Gordon Lightfoot collaborated with Barry White, or that Sade decided life was for shit. This album definitively shows the difference between Mr. Cohen, who in 1968 wanted to be the Canadian Bob Dylan, and Mr. Dylan, who was prevented from being Canadian by the grace of only a few miles.
Of course, the difference is really between Dylan and everybody else. While many artists from the sixties reinvented themselves many times over, people like Cohen and Joni Mitchell (whom I consider to be up there too, if we can have two Canadians on the list), pretty much settled into the same schtick at a certain point. Maybe it took Cohen longer than some of them. Maybe his schtick is better. But it’s still schtick. Dylan’s offering is just more weird shit, and he can’t help it (and Greil Marcus backs me up here).
While the Dylan album makes compelling arguments for what contemporary pop music might sound like in twelve alternate universes, Cohen’s merely posits what pop music might sound like if Leonard Cohen got involved in it. That’s what kind of bugs me about the album: if you read the lyrics, they are wryly insightful poetry, but it’s easy to just sit there and listen to this plodding Adult Contemporary sound and never realize that. That seems a shame. What is he aiming for with this? Why is he trying to trick people into liking his record? Does he think it can stir something deep beneath the Lacoste crocodiles?
Also, I haven’t tested this exhaustively, but note that you can more or less sing the lyrics to all of these “new songs” to any tune from the last couple of decades’ worth of his records.
It’s nice to get a shot of Leonard (a man whose philosophy might be found in his insisting to rhyme “lover” and “hunger”) in these end times. His continuing obsession with all the women who have broken his heart without his giving a shit about it seems positively quaint on a planet where this has nothing to do with the rest of us. They locked up a man who wanted to make a Leonard Cohen album; they locked up the wrong man.
Don’t get me wrong: I like the album, but it feels too much like the application of Cohenesque values to a Sony product, and not enough like an album anyone was driven to create.
In one final parallel: as you may know, Dylan produced his recent disc himself. The low-rent cover art led one wag to suggest that he had taken on graphic design duties as well. The cover of the Cohen album is a photo by the artist himself which he must have goofed around with in Photoshop, because I recognize the Dry Brush filter. So Cohen’s low-rent self-designed cover is the icing on the cake, because the album strikes me as being something of a caprice…ten years in the making.
Other titles considered for the above item:
“Ten Immediately Old Songs”
“Cry A While for Po’ Boy Lenny (Too Much To Ask)”
“I’m still making love in my secret wife”
“I took my Leonard Cohen album to the pawn shop, but that don’t make it junk”
“Say goodbye to Alexandra Levy”
by Jack, January 19, 2005 6:18 PM | More from Drinking & Women
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"something deep beneath the Lacoste crocodiles?"
That's fucking brilliant!