And I'm NOT saying Leonard Cohen '"is" a lounge lizard. My argument is that he sometimes has a notable lounge-like quality to him, which is often his own parody of one, but not always; AND, moreover, that while his lyrical skills are clearly that of a great poet and not those of an ersatz sentiment, his vocals are often delivered with the sang-froid of a lounge lizard--sometimes quite poorly. To quote Randy Jackson, he's "pitchy."
I include here quotes from reviews/blogs etc., just to show that my views are not isolated--even if we are all wrong.
1. "'Always,'" the Irving Berlin chestnut, is another matter: Cohen delivers it in a lugubrious lounge-lizard moan, complete with a spoken intro that sounds like Barry White revved down to 16 RPMs. It's difficult to tell whether Cohen's tongue is in his cheek on this one, but either way it's one of his most surreal tracks ever." -- David G. Whitis, "The Future"
2. Question--All of the following adjectives have been used to describe you; are any correct?
bard of the bedsits apocalyptic lounge lizard
durable hipster Jeremiah of Tin Pan Alley
legendary ladies man amiable gangster
existential comedian poetic playboy
spin doctor for the Apocalypse emotional imperialist
grizzled prophet restless pilgrim
damaged priest the Godfather of Gloom
hippie icon patron saint of angst
the prince of bummers
Answer — "All of them." From an interview by Ira B. Nadel
3. "The acoustic guitar of lounge-lizard easy-listening inspired 'Bar Noir' bings to mind the more laid back barfly tunes of Tom Waits or the flat vocal delivery of Leonard Cohen in its slick sardonic restraint, all dimly lit jazz stages and curling smoke from discarded cigarettes, while a femme-fatale in 50's garb snares some poor unsuspecting private eye into her film-noir existence of half-truths and deceptive glamour." Review of Alex Fergusson's The Castle, by heathenharvest.com
4. And this from a random blog, responding to YEARS of Cohen criticism--as with Bob Dylan--that Cohen is not much of a singer, though he might have become a better one around Death of a Ladies' Man.:
"I think what makes Death of a Ladies' Man my favourite Leonard Cohen album I've heard so far is the way it firmly disproves the notion that Cohen is a bad singer, or not a singer at all, in a way I'm Your Man, The Future and the career-spanning (but Ladies' Man-omitting) The Essential Leonard Cohen all fail to do. I love, adore, lionize Cohen's 'mature' voice, that dry croak that gives his later albums a disproportionate amount of their weight...This is part of Cohen's appeal, part of what sets him apart, and it's not as if he's unable to be visceral, it's just a different kind of viscerality. But on Death of a Ladies' Man, possibly due to writing all of the songs with Phil Spector, he's actually singing there with the songs (I have no idea how to actually describe this) - his performance on 'Memories' alone should absolve him of the need for any defence of his ability to sing (to say nothing of the glassily exuberent 'Don't Go Home With Your Hard-On' or the shattering, final title track). I mean, he may have lost it since, but he did have it at one point, and he was great at it. It's just an aspect to his talent that has been overlooked."
Here, the blogger protests too much--his exceptional singing proves the rule that he couldn't sing very well to begin with. I do like his singing, as we all do, but he fudges. Now Lounge Lizards are sometimes good singers (Paul Anka, Mel Torme, both jazz-trained), sometimes bad ones (various "Heya!" Rat Packers, etc.), but the meaning of the word, which dates back to at least 1923, signifies chiefly a ladies man or barfly who waits around for women; or a man who merely frequent lounges. Both are strictly speaking non-singing, but Cohen has adopted the ladies man persona the way so many crooners have and has somehow taken the cheesiness OUT of it. So the reluctance to align Cohen with loungeness perhaps derives from the fear of representing him as cheesy and ersatz, as trying to hard, which he's not. Even his parodical quality authenticates him. But he's got the jackets (check out the lapels fromt he 70s--eat your heart out Bryan Ferry [who, by the way, has also been labelled lounge]), the cozy, comfy intimacy of just this side of the piano, and the tendency to avoid those tough notes by covering it over with emphasized timbre, and--what ultimately allows him to transcend--meaningful lyrics. So think of him as a good Scotch, complex and rich, but with defininite "notes" of lounge.
5 comments:
OK: clearly you've investigated this, and have a lot of good points. My main objection was to Patrick saying that Cohen was "essentially" a lounge singer, somehow implying that the "lounginess" lies at the heart of his craft. However, all of the examples you cite are from Cohen's late career, during which he adopted parodic lounge stylings. Anyone who listens to Cohen's early work will quickly hear the similarity to Dylan's urbanized folksiness. There is no lounge factor in an album such as "New Skin for the Old Ceremony," or in most of Cohen's famous earlier recordings (Hey that's No Way to Say Goodbye, Bird on a Wire, or even Famous Blue Raincoat). The lounge factor comes later, and is consciously adopted. Being that authentic lounge is probably extremely earnest in it's mediocrity (that's what makes it cheesy), I'm not really sure the distinction holds merit. Also, there's the problem of defining "lounge"--a word with a definition as ersatz as the style it references. Music criticism is one of the most jingoistic industries out there, so I wouldn't be willing to relinquish these few points without a historical inquiry into what exactly lounge "is."
That being said, I am impressed by how much attention you've given this. Perhaps the problem lies in my own association of lounge with tawdriness and unoriginality (lounge singers usually do not play instruments or write their own material both of which Cohen does).
Yes--I've overlooked his early stuff. And I don't like "essentially" either. And we've got to think more about lounge. I don't want to give it up to the neo-lounge crowd, like Richard Cheese ("Get up, Get Down a-With the Sickness, Hey!").
I like your phrase "extremely earnest in its mediocrity"--lets hold onto that and test such paradoxes with whatever cases we find.
I gaze with nostalgia at my copy of L.C.'s Collected Poems 1956-1968 and two of his novels from the same era as I write this comment, so please consider my bias duly noted.
The Future, released during my first semester at college, is one of the great political albums of our time. This record alone would disqualify Cohen from Lounge Singer status since, as q notes above, loungies are interested in crooning cover songs intimately to entertain an audience.
Cohen has always valued poetic truth, and the saying of it, over the virtues of entertainment. I didn't listen to Songs of Leonard Cohen over and over again when I was 14 because of the beats. His singing is pretty flat, yes; he doesn't have much of any range, yes; but it doesn't matter. He sings poetic ballads, and the lyrics take primacy without exception, on every track.
I think his less-than-stellar voice and the intimacy of his style give him a lounge singer veneer—but only with the most casual of glances. Looking at his career as a whole and recognizing his recent self-parody for what it is, one must conclude without a doubt he is NOT essentially a lounge singer.
If one tries to make him fit "essentially" in any musical genre, then one might label him a "folk singer." But he was a poet first, a novelist second, and only then a singer, so I'm not sure you can put him in any particular category unproblematically.
But he's so much more than any of this. He's your man.
Yes--I've made sure not to feature his lyrics in anyway, only his vocal delivery. I would be a fool to apply "lounge" to a poet.
Yes—the delivery is the issue. You're right.
But he arranges and produces his music with so much self-awareness that I think even the delivery isn't categorically Lounge, especially over the whole of his discography. The early stuff, such as Songs from a Room, has those weird, haunting choruses that make the seeming "folk" albums not really folk. And, in another phase, The Future is totally overproduced—but he's commenting (in part) on the overproduction of culture circa 1992, and so you realize he's making a big joke with the overproduction of his own album. So the most recent lounge quality (particularly in the film I'm Your Man) is delightful, for me at least, because it's yet another in a string of sophisticated dallyings with his persona. Now he's the ancient crooner, the aged loverboy still grasping at hipness (Viagro?!). Hilarious because he knows it, has thought about it, and has come out yet another side. I mean, getting U2, a stadium band, to perform in a plush lounge is funny in itself.
I'm not saying Cohen as a vocalist/stylist is Madonna or anything; I just think he knows enough to create an image and make it ironic at once. So even defining his delivery or style becomes difficult (particularly when you don't focus on an album or two, but look at him as a performer over the long term). That's a good trick for a singer with a marginal voice.
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