Blindspotting: Leonard Cohen, "You Want It Darker"

One last album of slammin' pop bangers from MC Leo

Cropped version of Leonard Cohen's album cover for You Want It Darker (2016)
Portrait of the artist as not a young man

The Legacy: You definitely don't need me to recap the half-century of knob-slobbering that the critical community bestowed upon Leonard Cohen starting with 1967's Songs of Leonard Cohen, and I think we can all agree at this point that covering "Hallelujah" should be punishable by law, so instead I'll focus on the final chapter of Cohen's life and career, which started around the time he learned that his former manager — and ex-lover — had plundered his assets to the tune of roughly $5 million, plus the loss of some lucrative publishing rights.

We tend not to think of rock stars — or whatever Leonard Cohen was, since calling him a rock star feels inaccurate and beneath him somehow — as needing to think about retirement funds, particularly once they reach household name status. Cohen's plight was illustrative for a lot of people in this way, and it added a poignant underscore to his subsequent decision to replenish his accounts by returning to the road at the age of 71.

Although Cohen was less than enthusiastic about taking up live performance again — an experience he described as "an opportunity for a thousand humiliations" — it turned out to be the spark of an unexpected creative revival. He'd famously been living in a monastery during the decade leading up to his financial reversal, and while he'd never exactly been a prolific recording artist, the gaps between new records started getting bigger in the '80s. While the road tends to be pretty bad for the songwriting muse as far as most artists are concerned, it proved a boon for Cohen: He released three albums between 2012 and 2016, all of which were smothered with critical praise. They also brought him some of the highest chart placements of his entire career in the U.S., but that has to be taken with at least one grain of salt; while it's true that people were glad to see him back in action, it's also true that it's gotten a hell of a lot easier to break into the Top 20 since record sales cratered at the turn of the century.

You Want It Darker, the final installment in the aforementioned trilogy, was recorded as Cohen's health started to spiral. Although going back on tour was great for his career, it wasn't so good for his physical well-being, and by the time he got down to work on what would be the last album he released during his lifetime, he was dealing with some serious (and seriously painful) injuries to his spine. Given that Cohen was never exactly a vocal belter, it's hard to determine to what extent this impacted his ability to perform the material, but it's probably fair to say it colored his state of mind during the writing and recording process. Which was fitting, really — Cohen was not a young man, he'd had a lengthy career, and he was in the right spot for a real "lion in winter" collection.

Extreme winter, as it turned out. Leonard Cohen died on November 7, 2016, less than three weeks after You Want It Darker was released.

First Impressions: Cohen's songwriting talent is unassailable, but I've always found his stuff to be very tough going during the extremely brief moments I've tried to engage with it. It can be plodding, it tends toward the dour, and as a singer, he makes Robert Preston sound like Mike Patton. I believe Columbia sent me The Future for review in '92, and I believe I lasted less than a single song. There are plenty of great reasons for the fact that Cohen's songs have always been more popular when they're covered by other artists, and I can't argue with any of them.

(Again: Stop covering "Hallelujah.")

All of this is to say that I eyed You Want It Darker with no small amount of trepidation, despite a dear and trusted friend urging me to listen to it. And honestly, during my first trip through the track listing, I was unmoved; from a certain point of view, this record isn't much more than an old man muttering for 36 minutes. But there's a reason I often spend an entire day listening to these Blindspotting albums, and that reason is this: The more time you spend with a record, the more likely you are to come around to the artist's point of view. I suppose it's a little like spending time in conversation with someone, although the conversation in this case is purely one-sided.

Context counts for a whole fuck of a lot when it comes to ingesting art, and that also has a lot to do with the way I felt myself being slowly drawn in. You Want It Darker is an album preoccupied with endings, and right now, it feels very much like we are trapped in a moment when we are being forced to bear witness to the end of a great political experiment that many of us grew up believing we'd always be able to take for granted. As the rot of political death suffuses the air, surely soon to be followed by the human toll of abject cruelty wantonly unleashed by deranged buffoons drunk with power and greed, Darker feels like a prophecy — the last living testament from an artist whose legendary horniness never interfered with his ability to spot the cracks in society's armor.

As I said, context is everything, and no part of me believes Leonard Cohen had our current political moment in mind when he wrote these songs. But he didn't need to — you've no doubt seen the famous clip of Frank Zappa predicting an American fascist theocracy in the '80s, and Cohen was just as hip as Frank, so even if he wasn't thinking about the specific smug goons currently wiping their smelly dicks all over the levers of national power, I'd be willing to bet he saw them coming anyway.

Favorite Song: To be clear, I did not enjoy listening to You Want It Darker. I recognize its genius, and I think it's a perfect album for our current national moment, but I do not care for that moment, and listening to these songs does not make me feel good about the world or myself. I still feel a sense of achievement in having finally unlocked the ability to hear past Cohen's kludgy arrangements and comically limited vocal range, but if you ever come by my house and find me listening to this, it's probably time for a wellness check.

That said, I did laugh out loud when I was listening to "On the Level" and I heard the line "I was fighting with temptation / But I didn't want to win / A man like me don't want to see / Temptation caving in." I still tend to view Cohen's legendarily lengthy rewriting process as an affectation worthy of eye-rolling, but those are some fine lyrics. It's hard to argue with results, especially after listening to this album all day.