I'm Your Man - Leonard Cohen > Reviews > He's MY Man!!!

Author's product rating:   

Originality	Groundbreaking
Lyrics	Sublime
Quality and consistency of tracks	Flawless
How does it compare to the artist's other releases	Outstanding
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	I've run out of superlatives
Disadvantages:	None, nyet, nada

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

This album has to my mind a strong claim for being the best ever recorded, at least it is one of my personal favourites and was the first Leonard Cohen record I bought. That alone would be a good reason to review it but there is a second, more important reason. I want to dispel the wholly baseless libel that Leonard Cohen is boring and that it is music to commit suicide by. I shared the first as a belief and have often joked about the second but, joking apart, I can think of no greater disservice to modern music than this ill-serving myth.

Leonard Cohen is first and foremost a poet. Critically acclaimed from an early age he had written three books of poetry and two novels - The Favourite Game and Beautiful losers - before turning his hand to music at the ripe old age of 32.

This is a review of an album and not his career so I shall skip the success he had as a folkish rock singer with a nasal twang. By 1988 his career as a singer seemed washed up. His previous album Various Positions was not even released in the US. Then something happened…..

Cohen who had always maintained a fairly acoustic and/or ballady tempo discovered synthesizers. The shock for his fans of hearing the driving synthesizer and drums which kick off this album must have been great indeed.

So, an urgent thudding bass, synthesizer and drum launch "First We Take Manhattan", a stylish sax soars over the beat and Cohen's voice (deepened with the smoke of thousands of cigarettes since the nasal twang of the sixties and seventies) then booms out portentously:

"They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
for trying to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them"
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin"

The word "reward" is enounced with anticipatory gusto…revenge is a dish best served cold. The chorus is sung by Anjani - Cohen's records and concerts have always featured singers - providing stark contrast to the poet's voice.

What is the song about? Is it is a nonsense protest song or a vindication of Cohen's career as someone awkward to classify but impossible to keep down? Whatever, it is a great song and one which redefined his career.

"You loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win" is hardly a line written by a pessimist. It is also a reminder that although you might be sunk in depression today, you sure can get out of it tomorrow and be a winner.

"Ain't No Cure For Love" is a different tack. A fairly straightforward love song with sophisticated jazzy sax, Cohen's old friend Jennifer Warnes helps out on vocals as well. The final verse is typical Cohen bringing together the profane and profound, needing no excuse for his love because "it's written in the scriptures.

The third song is a more socially aware critique. "Everybody Knows" deals with the AIDS epidemic - then at its shocking early height - and wealth/poverty as well as with personal issues. For Cohen the personal and the political have always mingled. The line:

"everybody knows you've been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
without your clothes
and everybody knows"

alone makes it worth buying this!

So to the title track. "I'm Your Man" is a career-defining moment of, a mission statement of someone who has always been scathingly honest with and about himself. The chorus is a sincere yet amusing vignette of what a man will do to get a woman, or to get into her knickers at least.

The second side of the album starts with Cohen's homage to one whom he reveres as a poet - Federico Garcia Lorca. "Take This Waltz" takes the text of a poem by Lorca and loosely translates it. A song glorifying life but embracing death, a song in love with love itself.

"Jazz Police" is the oddest track here and the one I found most difficult to assimilate. The words are as clever as anything else on the album:

"Jesus taken serious by many
Jesus taken joyous by a few
Jazz Police is paid by J.Paul Getty
Jazzers paid by J.Paul Getty II "

The music however is certainly jazzy at times and somewhat disjointed; the chorus seriously so!

"I Can't Forget" has a slightly country feel in its structure except that the instruments on it aren't really country at all. Cohen stumbles out of bed, smokes a cigarette and tightens up his gut. Ageing and memory are the issues here, "summer's gone but a lot goes on forever. And I can't forget".

So to the final song, "Tower of Song". This carries on the theme of getting old, but here Cohen's wry humour is back. This song has provided many a laugh at concerts, as Cohen's voice gets deeper and more cracked. The line

" I was born like this I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice"

is always sung in concert with a pause before the "golden" which never fails to bring the house down. The Tower of Song is a symbol for entertainers, their helpless enslavement to their Muse and a juxtaposition to the Tower of Babel which was all sound and no meaning.

The cover features Cohen in some warehouse or studio wearing a pinstripe suite, t-shirt and shades (cool or what?), holding a half-eaten banana in a dignified manner.

Excellent lyrics, with a wry, dry wit which at times spills into open humour. Boring? Music to commit suicide to? Give me a break! Repeating a lie many times makes it no more of a truth. I strongly suspect many of those who have moaned at Leonard Cohen have never heard one of his sons, or haven't listened properly if they did. Or haven't the ability to understand. As for me? He's MY man!!!!