Leonard Cohen
Songs Of Love And Hate

Exorcising ghosts from the human mind, forcing them out of their darkest hiding places to be exposed, in order to capture them in meticulous, ruthlessly realistic musical portraits, without smoothing over the humps, without omitting the most horrible details. This too is an art, and far from easy, starting with the technique to use. Some think that exploring the perverse side of our soul only requires a picturesque kit of diabolic symbols (more or less decomposed corpses, more or less Celtic crosses, 666 and other oddities), all accompanied by the racket of distorted guitars, beastly shouts, and wild drums. I don't think it's the right path, and after all, Oscar Wilde in his amusing story "The Canterville Ghost" taught us that spirits hate noise and flee from it. It's more likely that they are attracted by the sound of a cavernous, sweetly tired and disillusioned voice, along with a guitar that accompanies with sparse, mournful bell-like chords. But even this isn't enough. The most important condition is still missing: that this voice belongs to a poet. Leonard Cohen is one, in both the literal (or literary) sense, and as an author of some of the most expressive and profound lyrics ever set to music.

And his third album, "Songs Of Love And Hate" (1971) is no exception; if anything, it represents the nadir of his tormenting psychological exploration, the most dangerously close point to the brink of total despair. The "black" album of the great Canadian poet is a disconcerting gallery of degraded human situations, so much so that even the only heroine present, Joan of Arc ("Joan Of Arc") is so only in name. In reality, she is a woman now resigned, tired of war and a victim of the role she has played so far, tired even of life, who in a last impulse of vitality gives herself to the fire with the same passion she would give to a lover. We are far from that tragedy of the senses that overwhelms "Nancy" from the previous record, and even more so from those vivid and indelible colors that make the figure of the hypersensitive "Suzanne" from the debut album fascinating. In any case, even "Joan Of Arc", like the other two Cohen female icons, struck Fabrizio De André, who knew how to translate her in his unique way. Leonard Cohen knows how to get the most from his essential instrumentation. Take the start of "Avalanche" ("Valanga"): the guitar strings, nervously plucked, vibrate like the electric cables of a railway before the train arrives. A climate of tremulous anticipation is created, accentuated by the deep lament of the strings, and finally more than satisfied by the genuine avalanche of confessions and regrets that Cohen's harsh voice unloads on the defenseless listener, right up to the final verses, deadly in their total rejection of any pity: "Do not dress in rags for me, I know you are not poor; and do not love me so fiercely, when you know you are not sure...". Enough to unsettle an economist’s sensitivity.

The same frenetic plucking animates "Love Calls You By Your Name", but here at least the lyrics offer some solace, thanks to the chorus line ("Love calls you by your name"), a dim but unexpected ray of sunshine closing each stanza. It's no coincidence that such guitar tremors will later provide the backdrop first to the most touching confession-text ever written by Fabrizio De André ("Amico fragile"), and much later to his most apocalyptic picture of the current world ("La domenica delle salme"). But we have still not reached the abyss of unhappiness. "Last Year’s Man" and "Dress Rehearsal Rag", mercilessly sequenced, achieve this several times. The first is a haunting sequence of images of material and human decay: "Last year’s man" lives in a place that is the very symbol of his degradation ("The skylight is like a drum’s skin I will never patch"), and from here he lucidly retraces the steps of his downfall without lifting a finger to prevent it. Initially, voice and guitar wallow in the mire of long dolorous notes, then the ballad gains just enough animation to drag itself forward somehow. In "Dress Rehearsal Rag", the desperation is even more pressing: Cohen’s voice seems to oppose the infinite sadness of the music with a certain anger, but with a chilling tone, making one fear at any moment the outbreak of an irrepressible sobbing. As if that were not enough, at the end of each stanza, one must reckon with the rhetorical question: "Has it or hasn’t it been a long decline, a strange decline?" while eventually facing the chilling truth that all this decline is nothing more than "a dress rehearsal in rags" for something else that will inevitably come... ("Cheer up!", Mike Bongiorno would say).

One recovers (relatively) with "Diamonds In The Mine", a pre-Waitsian hybrid of deranged reggae and spiritual choruses, and "Sing Another Song, Boys", immersed in a similar climate of a drunken, ramshackle party, the only cheerfulness Cohen is able to offer us. But the quintessential "song of love and hate" is "Famous Blue Raincoat". The immense tenderness of its beautiful singable theme manages to tear for a while the black and gloomy veil that covers much of the album. Under the "famous blue raincoat," naturally "torn at the shoulder," hides a friend-enemy, both betrayer and betrayed, to whom Leonard Cohen, on a sleepless December night, writes perhaps the sincerest and most passionate letter ever set to music. The two friends-enemies share a deep relationship with the same woman, but at least Leonard is so overwhelmed by the weight of those distant memories that he doesn't know if he misses the ex-friend ("my brother, my killer"), not being able to forgive or punish him, but only to say "if you ever come by here, for Jane or for me, I want you to know your enemy is sleeping; I want you to know that her woman is free", with the same tone with which he sketches the neutral backdrop of the story, a cold New York but full of music until late at night.

What else is there to say? That the only ones who might be discouraged from such a masterpiece, for obvious reasons, are the depressed. Otherwise, just a warm invitation to read the lyrics: with Leonard Cohen, it's always worth it.