![]() ![]() Today, the myth of the male genius has come under fire in the wake of movements such as #MeToo and Time’s Up, which have established the role of such tropes in legitimating the abusive treatment of women. This is a classic example of what historian Martin Jay calls the “aesthetic alibi” men have been using since the nineteenth century to justify bad behaviour. He responds by seeking freedom, recognizing the need to dismantle love…for only art can truly seduce Leonard Cohen.” On the first page of his 1994 biography, Leonard Cohen: A Life in Art, Ira Nadel notes approvingly, “when entrapped by beauty, finds his art imperiled. songs such as “Hallelujah,” “Suzanne,” “So Long, Marianne,” “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye”…). In his work, women are often depicted as muses-quasi-mystical figures who inspire the poet’s imagination and then conveniently disappear (cf. ![]() “ I wasn’t very good at the things that a woman wanted” (read: fidelity). By his own admission, Cohen was never “very good” at relationships: “I had a great appetite for the company of women,” he said in a 2005 interview. Given that our threshold for bad male behaviour is currently sitting at an all-time low, we can surmise that Cohen’s “ladies’ man” persona-cultivated in an era when the term still connoted “romantic artist” rather than “pickup artist”-would get less traction now. Still, I think it worth considering how the posthumous focus on the “later” Cohen-whose grandfatherly, fedora-clad image towers benevolently (in duplicate!) over Montreal-obscures a more complex understanding of a man who, before he became divine, was obsessed with the flesh, and not always in ways that are palatable today. Writer and critic Anakana Schofield said it best in an essay published a month before Cohen’s death: “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.” Full disclosure: as the child of two Montreal-raised Jews (one of whom is, incidentally, a Leonard), I’ve been steeped in Cohen’s music/legend since I was a zygote, and my love for him abides. Such is the aura of sacredness that attaches to the High Priest of Pathos that dissident views are treated as heresy. lang, and currently in contention for the most overperformed song in history-and you’ve got yourself a prophet. The haunting title track, featuring backing vocals by the Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue Choir, makes you feel like Cohen is in direct communion with God as he proclaims, in the Biblical tongue of his ancestors, “Hineni, hineni/ I’m ready, my Lord.” Add to this the massive success of “Hallelujah”-ignored when first released in the eighties, resurrected by Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, and k.d. ![]() The posthumous hagiography attests to the power of Cohen’s religious imagery, which arguably reached its peak in his final album, You Want It Darker. The former enfant terrible of Canadian arts and letters-erstwhile refuser of Governor General’s awards, ingestor of drugs on Greek islands, recipient of head on unmade beds-has transmogrified, through death, into a holy figure. The description is not hyperbole or metaphor but an accurate assessment of Cohen’s immaculate status in the current zeitgeist.
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