Why Leonard Cohen felt empowered to pronounce benedictions
If it is true that a serious artist is one with the capacity to go on reinventing who they are in their work, Leonard Cohen unquestionably counts as serious. Not that anyone is likely to think of him as frivolous, exactly. While the famously acid description of his songs as ‘music to slit your wrists to’ is hardly fair, the whole persona, the register of his writing and performing, resists any mood of simple celebration. The ‘cold and… broken Hallelujah’ of his most celebrated and over-exposed song, the ‘broken hill’ from which praise is uttered (in ‘If It Be Your Will’), reminds us unsparingly of where he believed his music
