Leonard Cohen bookends his new album Old Ideas with a song about mortality (“Going Home”) and a song about the divided culture (“Different Sides”). Throughout, Cohen refines the use of gospel-impulse female singers who added vitality to his own special, deep-toned gravity on the great 1992 The Future (remember the title track’s exhortations to “Repent!”).
With their controlled harmonies and evocative vocalizations on the good Old Ideas, his back-up singers catalog call-and-response: semiotic felicity (“Banjo”), personification (“Lullaby”), bearing the blues (“The Darkness”), catharsis (“Anyhow”) and the community of witness (“Show Me the Place”). Through this technique, Cohen appeals to the vernacular sustenance and example resident in the tropes of a shared popular culture.
Cohen explicates the salvational and unifying intent of the back-up singers on “Amen”: “Tell me again when the filth of the butcher is washed in the blood of the lamb/ Tell me again when the rest of the culture has passed through the Eye of the Camp.” The various connotations of “Camp” rhyme with “lamb” to parabolic ends. Cohen locates a passageway through cruelty and suffering to love and redemption.
Dana Glover’s vocals on “Come Healing” and “Different Sides” elevate Cohen’s entreaty to the level of sublime seduction. Making desire palpable, she also counters loneliness: “O solitude of longing/ Where love has been confined.” Her overdubbed falsetto combines with Cohen’s recrudescence of “old ideas” to achieve philosophical rigor. Glover’s vocalization on the phrase “penitential hymn” makes concrete the action (faith) that brings “healing of the spirit/ healing of the limb.”
The spirit/flesh binary leads to a divided culture. “Different Sides” describes right-wing and left-wing Puritanism in intimate terms: “Both of us say there are laws to obey/ But frankly I don’t like your tone/ You want to change the way I make love/ I want to leave it alone.”
Glover’s tight vocal runs (like threading a needle) counter divisive rhetoric and demonstrate interpersonal communication with an irresistible “tone (whoaah uhh-ooh)” and “alone (whoaah uhh-ooh alooone).” Cohen heals the divide by restoring meaning to signs of life: the physical gesture and liberating pop codes (“C’mon baby give me a kiss/ Stop writing everything down”). Reviving old ideas, Cohen confronts the anxiety (fear of death) at the core of contemporary crisis.
John Demetry provides a radical alternative to the flesh-spirit binary axiomatic to most contemporary arts criticism in his book The Community of Desire: Selected Critical Writings (2001-2007), available at www.lulu.com.