Leonard Cohen: Hilarious Jewish Asshole

That old buzzard Leonard Cohen is one of those performers I like more than love. The received fatalism of his early work endears him to the young, for whom the grotesqueries of Tom Waits sound like wisdom (fatalism always sounds like wisdom when it's croaked). Rescreening Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs Miller last week, I noted, stunned, that the use of Cohen's songs was the most blatant concession to exposition and foreshadowing -- two elements Altman usually eschews with admirable doggedness. "Sisters of Mercy" sounded like so much jive (sorry, Lex).

For me he only hit his stride when he replaced the acoustic guitars with the Econo-Lodge synthesizers and hootchie-cootchie backup singers around the time of 1988's I'm Your Man. This and 1993's The Future indulge the fantasies of a pseudo-libertine who's drunk enough cognac to start to believe he had an active sex life; try to take his Gitanes and he'll horrify you with a 108-minute version of "Always." But he is erudite, at his best dropping prurient invocations ("Give me crack and anal sex/Take the only tree that's left/and stuff it up the hole/in your culture") which evoke the crumbling of the American Republic with more wit and foresight than Gore Vidal. In his sixties he realized that fatalism is really the sharpening of one's affinities for black humor. A shame then that his last two albums evoke instead Gerald Ford reciting a lifetime's worth of platitudes to a female grad student.

Cohen's in the news a lot these days, the subject of a documentary produced by, yes, Mel Gibson (who must have recogized himself as one of "Democracy"'s targets and is therefore a better sport than I); and in Mike Powell's rather magesterial reappraisal of his maligned 1977 collaboration with Phil Spector, Death of a Ladies' Man. Mike positions Cohen as part of the renowned lineage of Hilarious Jewish Assholes, of which Lou Reed, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker are charter members. I'd add Burt Bacharach, Randy Newman, Paul Simon, and, of course, Bob Dylan (whose contemporaneous Street-Legal wheezes "schlocky barroom bullshit," only it's not as funny).