Leonard Cohen at 70 and His Continuing Appeal to Boomers

Leonard Cohen is not technically a baby boomer –he just missed the wave of this famous demographic wave. Born in 1938 he is now the grand old man of 70 and looks the part of a wise old sage enough for a documentary to be made about him recently, “I’m Your Man” featuring Bono everyone’s favorite global conscience pricker and a cast of the younger generation of his admirers—most notably Nick Cave and RufusWainwright. But Cohen has made his impact on boomers in more subtle ways than say someone like Dylan, who at 67 can be entitled to the crown boomer popular music artist in chief. Cohen is what we listened to in the 1970s and 1980s as the hope of free love and peace romance faded. The rise of Reaganism, the murder of John Lennon, the corporate takeover of youth culture gave us all some very bad days—not that Cohen’s music was the only solace, but it was good to know that the old man of song was still being faithful to his lonely muse, even when Dylan was turning to Jesus.

What was it about Cohen’s melancholy that struck such a chord for boomers? His songs are often about betrayal and loss—beautifully expressed as with the Famous Blue Raincoat—how can we not be moved by the dark chords that open that great song

It’s four in the morning, the end of December
I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better
New York is cold, but I like where I’m living
There’s music on Clinton Street all through the evening.

His personae is akin to Dylan wishing his former lover well—in songs like “Girl From the North Country”—but he knows something about the bleakness in her heart that Dylan did not suspect about his lovers

I hear that you’re building your little house deep in the desert
You’re living for nothing now,
I hope you’re keeping some kind of record.

The song though turns out not to be about either of them but the person who deserted both of them

She sends her regards.
And what can I tell you my brother, my killer
What can I possibly say?
I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you
I’m glad you stood in my way.

Dylan of the early and middle period at least could not go near these kind of complex emotions. Emotions that seem always shadowed by a faint masochism—an early theme in Cohen and one that seems to be part of a willingness to be naked, vulnerable in a shocking way akin to the picture of the naked Lennon and Ono taken by Annie Lebowitz as one of the most iconic Rolling Stone covers.


Cohen is always after what it means to be in despair –to be absolutely naked –and alone-and therefore religion with its huge weight of language imagery is always playing near or at a distance from his lyrics. That sense of the sacred as never far from the personal if not the profane maybe part of the reason boomers are drawn to his lyrics—because while a mass of us rebelled from organized religion and its power to suppress individuality Cohen’s insistence that the iconography still had meaning (as in his great anthem to love in “Hallelujah") a meaning that we were free to interpret in a personal way gave his songs a Biblical resonance that Dylan had once aspired to in a song like “A Hard Rain is Gonna Fall” and returned to again in “Every Grain of Sand.” You don’t need to be a believer he seems to be saying in “Hallelujah” to understand the spiritual nature of the world,

You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

The man seemed not to be posing—as Dylan who changed his image and style every decade might be accused of –Cohen’s theme of finding meaning through suffering and failed love was there from the beginning. Cohen confirms in a recent BBC interview that he actually met with Bob Dylan, - “a lovely afternoon just of shop-talk” but was careful to note the difference in the time it takes Dylan to compose his songs as opposed to the time it takes Cohen – two years for “Hallelujah” as against fifteen minutes for one of Dylan`s songs. The boomers who are for the most part re-discovering him today are returning partly because of nostalgia for a bygone era—but also they are now ready for the denser material that Cohen had created than the typical pop lyric of their youth. They were also ready for a further challenge—now that they had passed on their love for artists like the Beatles and the Stones was it not time to try to pass on a few other greats?

It was no surprise that while boomers were getting rich—Cohen was shedding his wealth—having been defrauded $5 million dollars by an agent he trusted while he sojourning during some of this period in a Buddhist Monastery. It seems that the period spent in the monastery—a period he now sees as a kind of failure—was the spur for the latest reintroduction of Cohen. Bono and others in the pop fraternity were clearly concerned that the loss of Cohen’s nest egg would pauperize the singer, which might explain Bono’s hyped praise for the singer—comparing him a few times to Keats and Byron. The fact that "I’m Your Man" may disappoint boomers and their children –with the new generation of singers like Cave and Wainwright only supplying us with hints of the singers’ power and Cohen equally only a few glimpses into his creative drive, should not be seen as too much of a setback. Cohen is now being talked about again by the people who cared for him back in their youth and the upcoming world tour—a massive challenge for any boomer is being taken on by this septuagenarian although as he admits in Tower of Song whose friends are gone and whose hair has turned grey still

“ache(s) in the places where I used to play”
And I'm crazy for love but I'm not coming on
I'm just paying my rent every day”

As optimistic and as life affirming as Leonard Cohen can get in person and in any lyric.

Nixonland

Nixon continues to haunt the boomers. He offers those who grew up in the sixties a core reason to revolt against his callow heartless amorality. Just as he nursed insane grudges against defenseless individuals even to the point of resorting to criminal behavior he continued to expand the cruel and inhumane VietNam war after promising using his "secret plan" to end it. As Frank makes clear that revolt was grist to the Nixon mill--he thrived on it as he knew his political base --the great "silent majority"-fearful of losing power to minorities and women were looking for a leader to preserve their sense of themselves. They were the ones that appreciated the code word "law and order" as they ran from the central cities and inner suburbs to discover ever new areas to re-create their 1950s nirvanas.




It was fitting that on his enemies list was John Lennon as well as a host of other boomer intellectuals and artists--as if in the depths of his inner personae he was also waging a deeper war against anyone who struggled towards wholeness and authenticity. Thomas Frank has already distingushed himself by writing one of the best recent books of our political analysis-What's the Matter with Kansas--and in his review of Rick Perlstein's Nixonland for the Wall Street Journal he writes that Nixon was the "The politician who fashioned a permanent Republican parable out of the decade's antagonisms was Richard Nixon. The man was born for the backlash." What Nixon mastered and became his road to political power, according to Perlstein was the revenge of the a resolutely indeterminate class who felt left out of the sixties cultural revolution leaving them isolated and insecure. In college he started a society he termed the "The Orthogonians" The term was as Frank describes it..."a made-up name that might well have meant, "the squares." Orthogonians weren't working-class, exactly, but nevertheless there was a real authenticity to their revolt against the glamorous ones – the "Franklins" – who lorded it over them. Recruiting like-minded Orthogonians and fueling their grievances, Mr. Perlstein writes, became the signature maneuver of Nixon's career, from the days of Alger Hiss all the way to the White House."


Frank's column is worth reading for the way he brings the Nixon achievement up to date by suggesting that the war between the elites and the rest of us is something that continues to fuel our politics in ways that may seem non obvious. Frank writes,

"Backlash is a chronic condition now, and one of the reasons is that hipness is chronic, too. The '60s culture that infuriated Nixon and his followers is everywhere today, because hipness and "revolution" have become a default mode of corporate speech. Youth had nothing to do with it: It happened thanks to the need for ever-accelerating novelty, reverence for a supposedly enlightened cyber-vanguard, and the great god "creativity.""

Frank gives what he terms a "typical example":

"Six years ago, when Business Week wanted to report that the South Korean economy was doing well, it ran a cover story proclaiming not that Korea was "Prosperous," or "Recovering," but that the country was "Cool," a concept it illustrated with a pair of young hipsters hanging out on the main drag of their university neighborhood."


Bringing Frank to some sobering conclusions about our current plight;


Yes, this culture is elitist. Just walk down the aisles of your local, union-free organic grocery, unutterably cool but way beyond your price range. Or stroll through the most upscale shopping district of your city, where you might notice the fake-shattered windows favored by one national retailer, evidently trying for that '60s look while not losing any stock to actual looters.

Yes, it's offensive, too. It's meant to be that way, to remind you always that you are not hot; that you've bought the wrong brand; that the vanguard is way ahead of you; that, with your organization-man craving for health benefits or job security, you probably need to be fired.



That is as close as anyone in recent memory has come to tracing the contortions of our current idiotic politics --with some large blame pointing back like the fingerprints on that Watergate door so many decades ago to the trickster in chief.

Robert Harris Ghost-Tony Blair redux

Tony Blair has entered contemporary fiction with a bang in this recent British thriller by the master story teller Robert Harris. He made of course a passing entrance in Ian McEwans' Saturday where a brief glimpse of him pretending to smile and care about some individual he was shaking hands with at the Tate Art Gallery was intended to confirm the impression of the empty suit inhabited by a skilled actor.


Robert Harris does not dispute McEwans' basic insight--but takes it further--much further--not to spoil it for readers but this highly accomplished babyboomer is reduced to a pretty accomplished puppet of a foreign power (no prizes for guessing which).


The fun is seeing how well Harris manages to (temporarily at least) convince us of the possibility and to entertain us with his amazing ability to keep his cool in situations that would alarm even the best of us. In some senses the book is more a comedy than a thriller although it has a few Agatha Christie like turns--when the book does not have its spotlight on Adam Lang-the Tony Blair character it reverts to being somewhat wooden --but as soon as Adam and to some extent his co-conspiring spouse appears--the novel becomes remarkably gripping.


What are we to make of this portrait of perhaps one of the top ten babyboomers we have -the silver tongued two term PM who dominated UK politics for more than a decade and ascended the world stage with his confident speeches that enabled the Bush doctrine of preemptive attack to be taken a lot more seriously by the liberal media in particular than if Bush was the one who had to "mis-articulate" it?


The portrait is clearly an over-reaction even a caricature--but does well to help illuminate the quality that any highly successful boomer must have--ability to perform well in front of a camera. This is a trait that Mr. Blair shared with his US counterpart Bill Clinton--both of them have a consumate ability to use TV to persuade. This gives them both remarkable powers--Harris helps us examine what happens to the inner person if those powers are not balanced by some moral compass, or even if they discover their moral core has atrophied completely. Boomers can identify with this problem well---after all were we not all brought up in the age of television--we know its capabilities and power in a way no other generation has. Add to this those skill Blair and Clinton in particular acquired as a result of their legal training. Both men have shown us their nimble skill in debate and argumentation with TV --in a way that even Nixon could not have managed as well.


Readers--do you agree with my assessment of the Harris novel--am I taking it too seriously regarding the babyboom theme--if there is one --and is there such a thing as a babyboom novel yet?