Leonard Cohen is definitely a little different in his influence than Jones and Bowie. His persona definitely isn’t as loud, or flamboyant as the two others, but in the same way, he used music as his medium to spread his ideas.
His ideas being a little less political and a little more philosophical, he had less of an obvious impact on society, but I still feel strongly that any person who actually listened to the stories Cohen was telling the world, they would be different person for it, and would be more conscious about being a better person and trying to make the world a better place. “ A Leonard Cohen song is an anchor flung into a churning sea. It has the kind of weight that could save your life.”11
I always thought that learning about historians, philosophy, politicians, artists was really important because History is here to be learned from. People have researched, experienced, experimented, made mistakes, learned, grew,… Starting from zero your own path is utter non-sense when you can build-up onto that historical knowledge. The philosopher George Santayana once said : “Those who don’t lean History and doomed to repeat it”12
I feel like this philosophy is very present in Leonard Cohen’s work. He asks big questions about life, death, sex and human nature and never stops to investigate. He looked for his answers in drugs, spirituality, religion, human contact, isolation, took the result, put it in the most beautiful way he could find and then shared it with people. All of it, not just the happy and hopeful ones. Leonard Cohen struggled most of his life with depression but seemed to have found peace about all of the ugly things he found. In Bono’s words “He finds shades in the blackness that feel like colour.”13 And in Cohen’s own words : “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”14 or “And I lift my glass to the awful truth, which you can’t reveal to the ears of youth, except to say it isn’t worth a dime.”15
In an interview for BBC, Leonard Cohen talks about defeat and how it is a thing that shouldn’t isolate us, but make us realise that we are apart of a “the great human chain with is really involved with the recognition of defeat” 16
Leonard Cohen isn’t delusional, he is very aware of some of the dark side of human nature and how dark the future of humanity could be (I’ve seen the future brother, it is murder) but his songs transmit such a deep love and trust in the human race and all of human behaviour. He is a man that is going to thank a girl that we would commonly call a slut for the love she’s giving everyone (And my very sweet companion she’s an angel of compassion, she’s rubbing half the world against her thigh, and every drinker every dancers lifts a happy face to thank her)17 who is going to understand all of the bad things we might do and forgive us, and still offer us his trust.
I am fully conscious of how cheesy it might all sound, but I do feel that, being aware of that trust Leonard Cohen has in the human race, I feel that he, at some level, imparts his trust in me personally, and having somebody that trusts in you, meaning somebody that you can disappoint, means that you are going to try harder.
Leonard Cohen has given me the will to consciously work everyday to be a better person, and contribute in making a beautiful race that is going to make a beautiful world, both by trusting in us, but also by obviously doing it himself and seeming so at peace with who he is.
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12. Santayana, G. (1905): The life of reason. Duke Classics.
14. Cohen, L. (1992) The Anthem (song)
15. Cohen, L. (1992) Closing Time (song)