Leonard Cohen's Message for the Future

Leonard Cohen exited stage left just one day before his most cogent prophecy came to pass on US Election Day 2016. In the 1992’s “The Future,” he sang

There'll be the breaking 

of the ancient western code 

Your private life will suddenly explode 

There'll be phantoms 

There'll be fires on the road 

and the white man dancing

You may be a Trumphead or you may be disgusted, but there’s no doubting that western codes are being broken left and right and on every side of the pond, that dumpsters of racism and bigotry along with forests here, there and everywhere are burning, and that drums beating a violent overture for an age of political and environmental disequilibrium are banging while some men in white—white robes to be exact—are dancing for joy just a few yards from the White House.

“Things are going to slide,” Cohen sang,

slide in all directions 

Won't be nothing 

Nothing you can measure anymore 

The blizzard, the blizzard of the world 

has crossed the threshold 

and it has overturned 

the order of the soul

Cohen was not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet. He was actually the son of a beloved Jewish Montreal family and the grandson of a religious man with whom he used to study the prophets—the Book of Isiah to be exact—in the original Hebrew. But in his way, as much as rock and roll and popular culture can allow, he brought a prophetic message to the radio as effectively as any figure of our time, notwithstanding his pal Bob Dylan.

Read the rest here...

Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize: 'More of an outlaw than you ever were'

It's easy to get sanctimonious about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. It's easy to enter the warm flow of his lyrics—so elastic and full of possibility that they have supported speeches of presidents, decisions of the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, countless nervous breakdowns and romantic break-ups and what will likely be hundreds of articles in the next few days—and pull together something reverent and wise. It's easy to get cute and cynical too. This whole business of black-tie galas for the elite to honor themselves? It's a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame redux, but without the All-Star band and those endless guitar solos while Paul Shaffer frantically tries to reel everybody back to the chorus. 

The one thing that's not easy is not saying something. We do a lot of Dylan around here—thousands of words written, thousands of hours hearing the songs, plumbing the lyrics no less passionately and carefully than Aquinas or Maimonides plumbed the holy books. The inbox is overflowing with good wishes because of this obsession. Yet another wave of Dylan is upon us, like the first time he almost died, or the second time he almost died or the years he was reborn and then came back and then disappeared in plain sight while somehow not meeting the expectations of some while still others celebrated the mere fact of living in his lifetime.

When it comes to Dylan, we're obligated to ask what this Nobel Prize is all about. Part of the answer is found in what Bruce Springsteen once said about Bob Dylan—not the line about Dylan freeing our minds after Elvis freed our bodies or how Dylan proved that a rock and roll song could contain the whole world. All of this is true and no one knows better than Springsteen. The rock and roll revolution at its best meant emancipation and justice and hope as powerfully as any burst of cultural enlightenment and challenge we've touched. We're thinking about that other gem of a quote, the one where Springsteen says that Dylan is like the brother that you never had.

Now wait a minute, Bruce. You're the brotherly one, the guy posing in Barnes and Noble stores across the country with soccer moms in cardigans and starry-eyed divorced dads on the cusp of old age. You're the one who turns up in pizza joints in New Jersey and L.A. to share a beer with a random admirer. As rarely seen offstage as the Coo Coo bird on the Fourth of July, at best Dylan might be spotted in public in a hooded sweatshirt looking for Springsteens's childhood home in the rain or pretending to beg for change next to his tour bus. 

There's a whole book comprised of fans' Dylan encounters. We read it twice and know him no better. Dylan is a chameleon, a path breaker belonging to no one. He is not a Bruce Springsteen kind of brother; he's something and someone else. 

Springsteen's comment on Dylan as your brother was cribbed from Dylan singing about Lenny Bruce, the ferocious comedic junkie prophet who died not long after Dylan first ruled the world:

They said that he was sick ’cause he didn’t play by the rules
He just showed the wise men of his day to be nothing more than fools 
They stamped him and they labeled him like they do with pants and shirts
He fought a war on a battlefield where every victory hurts
Lenny Bruce was bad, he was the brother that you never had

These may not be Dylan's best lyrics, appearing on Shot of Love, an album that did not garner much enthusiasm in its day. But if you sit with these words for a while, Springsteen's praise for Dylan as the brother you never had might actually explain what the the Nobel Prize means for all of us who care about how the spirit of popular culture conjured by Dylan has seized the world. Joan Baez explains this spell best in an interview in Martin Scorsese's documentary of Dylan, No Direction Home:

There are no veils, curtains, doors, walls, anything, between what pours out of Bob’s hand onto the page and what is somehow available to the core of people who are believers in him. Some people would say, you know, ‘not interested,’ but if you’re interested, he goes way, way deep. 

Dylan is not the brother who puts an arm around you after losing the ballgame like Bruce. He's not offering you a beer, or dropping in for a surprise visit on the way back from college or calling you up in the middle of the night to see how you're doing. He's really more like an uncle, an initiator, a darker figure in the background. He might be the brother back from the war, a silent presence smoking a cigarette in the dark; he's an older brother, someone who has seen so much and imagined so much more than no matter your awkwardness or pain or the strangeness of your questions and conclusions, he's been there. 

He's a voice in your head affirming all possibility, a kind of ultimate affirmation, but it's tough love. He's the ancestor you think you had, or wished you had, the one who ripped himself out of the old country to make a new life. He's fearless, maybe a godfather more than a brother or an uncle. He's steady in the night, well-studied, wise, capable of soothing wild fantasies and asking you the essential question not only of rock and roll but the whole wide world after religion had officially passed the mantle of truth to philosophy and science and then on to literature and now, just like the Nobel Prize, it has been passed to rock and roll.

"How does it feel," your brother asks, "to be on your own, no direction home, a complete unknown, like a Rolling Stone?"

Dylan is the definitive individualist, the anti-dogmatic, Romantic, wandering, unsatisfied, unbowed seeker in a world that Freud and James anticipated, Kafka writhed in, Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell teased out, and rock and roll ultimately owned. Like a mosaic floor of an abandoned temple scattered across a dry field without reason or rhyme, like the words of a newspaper William S. Burroughs would throw up in the air to make poetry and prose, like seventy years of family pictures scattered in the breeze, the organizing principles of our age are no longer what we are commanded by God or man, but rather how we feel. We ricochet from curiosity to passion to wasting time in the smallest corners of endless cubicles of consciousness that keep us all apart. For many, there's no more common Law, no more tradition, no more recognizable spirit weaving patterns through the days. There are only outlaws. There's living outside the law. All the rest is commentary.

"He was an outlaw, that’s for sure/More of an outlaw than you ever were," says Dylan of Lenny Bruce. We might say the same thing back to him, admiring his capacities and good fortune just a bit too much, but also understanding that if Dylan is a prophet—and he surely is not a prophet in the classical sense and surely dislikes being called one—he is a prophet of a world were everyone thinks him or herself a god, so many of us with the world in the palm of our hands but still restless and unsure about the purpose of it all.

"But to live outside the law you must be honest," Dylan sang in 1966's "Absolutely Sweet Marie." In a world where all truths are relative, individuals shape their own sense of honesty, of Law, of truth. That's a world where you miss your brother, the one you never had, the one who lays truth bare and asks the right question and lets you sit with it for as many years as it takes to feel the answer and see the world for what it really is. He's there, looking out the window, taking another drag of his cigarette, waiting for your answer, the one about who you really are. And if there's no brother to sit with you at the window, there's always the music of Bob Dylan. And does that feel? It feels great. Congratulations, Bob. You earned it.

***

For more on what Dylan really thinks of the Nobel Prize, look here:

***

And for more on Dylan, just because, visit here, here and here.

Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan Will Be Home for the Holidays

With the Days of Awe nearly upon us, it’s a good time to think about how Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen help people send their prayers where they need to go. Just as poets and seers over the past two millennia have built liturgies for people to plug into something greater than themselves, these two masters of popular song are pitching a ladder to climb the “Tower of Song” to “the place where martyrs weep and angels fear to tread.”

Of the two, Leonard Cohen is the more obvious inspiration for the High Holidays. He is a contemporary paytan, or liturgist, a role in Jewish spiritual life dating back to the biblical psalmist David, the star of “Hallelujah” who played a sacred chord that pleased the Lord. For thousands of years paytanim (the plural of paytan) have interpreted texts with virtuosity as part of the communal liturgy, using acrostics, allusions, allegories and hyperbole to linger on biblical stories, themes from the Jewish calendar or mystical reflection that anchored much of the structure of public prayer. 

These songs are called piyyutim (or piyyut in the singular), which is a Hebraization of a Greek term for prayer or devotion from which the word “piety” is derived. Some of the most beloved Jewish prayers are piyyutim: Adon Olam, Lecha Dodi, Ein Ke’Eloheinu. There’s also Heneni, a meditation on humility for those leading the Musaf portion of the prayer service rooted in the biblical phrase used by Abraham another others to say to the divine “I am here.” And this is also a biblical phrase about to launch from the house of prayer to the charts, as Cohen recites it along with a cantor and synagogue choir in his latest release, “You Want it Darker.”

Cohen famously asks “Who By Fire?” in a direct reworking of the words and melody of U’netanneh Tokef (right here with none other than Sonny Rollins on sax), an anchor for the High Holiday liturgy. He adds barbiturates and a lonely slip and a mirror to make this story of mortality stick for contemporary listeners.  

Obviously, his liturgical canon also includes “Hallelujah”—which cultural critic Greil Marcus has said is the closest thing pop music of the last fifty years has come to producing a hymn and the New York Times rightly reminds us actually deserves a rest. Cohen’s musical urges are attuned to atonement, reflection and renewal on all days. But this time of year, with “If It Be Your Will," “The Faith" and so many other tunes joining the chorus, Cohen’s chops as a liturgical teacher of the heart for the Days of Awe are clear.

If Cohen is rock's liturgist, Dylan leads its epics of salvation. In the period when he marked himself as perhaps most important cultural figure of the 20th century—a span of fifteen months, March 1965 to May 1966, which included the release of three of the greatest rock albums of all-time: Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde—Dylan was asked a great question by Nat Hentoff: “‘You told an interviewer last year, 'I've done everything I ever wanted to do.' If that's true, what do you have to look forward to?’ ‘Salvation,’” replied Dylan, “‘just plain salvation.’”

“Elvis freed your body, and Bob freed your mind.” That’s how Bruce Springsteen describes Bob Dylan. “He had the vision and the talent to expand a pop song until it contained the whole world.”

Body and soul, heaven and earth, life and death, love and loss, everything in the whole world and everything in between: That’s what Dylan sings about, and this breath and depth of  curiosity and vision is what made it possible for rock and roll as a culture to plum the gaps of meaning where religion had once powered human creativity, faith and imagination. 

Dylan’s songs follow figures in a dream, all representing the needs of the dreamer. These are heroes with a thousand faces. They float in and out of narratives that have been giving shape to quests across culture for thousands of years. More than any other figure, he is the person who brought the grandest and most common of human struggles to the radio, concert hall and to pop culture as a whole. And even in all of its commercialism and goofiness, questions of the spirit never left pop once Dylan brought them there. 

Consider a song that might be his most a spot-on choice for the Days of Awe, 1997’s “Trying to Get to Heaven Before They Close the Door.” With thick chords of barroom piano and swamp rock guitar and drums, the song ends with this verse:

Gonna sleep down in the parlour
And relive my dreams
I’ll close my eyes and I wonder
If everything is as hollow as it seems
Some trains don't pull no gamblers
No midnight ramblers like they did before
I been to Sugar Town, I shook the sugar down
Now I’m trying to get to heaven before they close the door

Here is one of countless examples of how Dylan does what Springsteen says about making a pop song contain the whole world. Sugartown might reference a Cherokee capital city of the Old America, or the Nancy Sinatra song of a weird one; the images of a train and midnight ramblers cut across Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie (and as another song master Paul Simon said it best: “Everybody loves the sound of a train/everybody knows it’s true”). All of this is bookended by a dream and a death, the very same template in narrative form that Cohen employed in “Who By Fire.” It's the same epic call for life against every conceivable kind of death, holding that all life passes “like a dream flying by,” the phrase with which U’netanneh Tokef  of "Who by Fire" ends. 

Dylan dreams in his parlour of both life and death, or at least the cusp of death, which perhaps is the most cogent mood of the High Holy Day liturgy. People are asked to push themselves through memories of deeds done, people who have passed, hopes dashed, dreams flashing and fading, all words and images hold at the very edge of the world where waking ends. This is Neila, the final major prayer of Yom Kippur, literally the locking of the gates of repentance. Come close to the edge and peer into nowhere, which leads everywhere, just like Dylan's song says "when you think you've lost everything/you can always lose a little more." But this is also the moment where one's life passes before one's eyes, only to be returned to the dreamer again for another chance.

People have been using prayers as communal mirrors for thousands of years. The words and melodies of prayer reflect back the soul that gazes into them. Some of these prayers, particularly from the liturgy of the Days of Awe, have reflected millions of faces. Across time and space, people passing through the Tower of Song steal a glance and move on, but with a different point of view than when they came upon the reflection they had held before. What is a prayer? What is a song? And what is the difference if both can touch the places where martyrs weep and angels fear to tread? To quote Paul Simon again, "these prayers are the memories of God." Few have merited to bring more words of grace and reflection to the world for so many in the past half-century than Dylan and Cohen. Don't hesitate to visit them wherever praying happens for the holidays, and feel right at home when you do.

The Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen Days of Awe Top Ten

Leonard Cohen

Who By Fire
If It Be Your Will
The Faith
Hallelujah
You Want It Darker

Bob Dylan

It’s Not Dark Yet, But It’s Getting There
Tryin’ to Get to Heaven Before They Close the Door
Lay Down Your Weary Tune
Going Going Gone
What Good Am I?
I Believe in You*

*Yes, we know that the last one comes from Dylan’s so-called Born Again Christian phase, but it is such a beautiful song of faith that we’d heart any time, just like Dylan’s wandering hero in "Brownsville Girl" would see anything starring Gregory Peck. He’d even sit through it twice. Just like us. Call it a bonus. Happy New Year.