Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
A strong and poetic voice falls silent
Tributes pour in for Leonard Cohen
LOS ANGELES: Leonard Cohen, rock music’s man of letters whose songs fused religious imagery with themes of redemption and sexual desire, earning him critical and popular acclaim, has died aged 82, a statement on his Facebook page said.
“It is with profound sorrow we report that legendary poet, songwriter and artist Leonard Cohen has passed away,” a statement on the Facebook page said. “We have lost one of music’s most revered and prolific visionaries.”
A memorial is planned in Los Angeles, where Cohen had lived for many years.
“RIP, Leonard Cohen,” singer-songwriter Carole King said on Twitter.
Singer Roseanne Cash echoed the lyrics from Cohen’s song Anthem when she said in a tweet: “Leonard Cohen is dead. There’s a crack in everything. No light yet.”
Cohen, a native of Quebec, was already a celebrated poet and novelist when he moved to New York in 1966 at age 31 to break into the music business.
Before long, critics were comparing him to Bob Dylan for the lyrical force of his songwriting.
Although he influenced many musicians and won many honours, including induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the Order of Canada, Cohen rarely made the pop charts with his sometimes moody folk-rock.
But Cohen’s most famous song, Hallelujah, in which he invoked King David and drew parallels between physical love and a desire for spiritual connection, has been covered hundreds of times since he released it in 1984.
Many of Cohen’s songs became hits for other artists, including Judy Collins, who helped Cohen gain fame by recording some of his early compositions in the 1960s.
His lyrics were deeply personal and at times took on an element of prayer, as in 1969’s Bird on the Wire in which he sang: “I swear by this song/ And by all that I have done wrong/I will make it all up to thee.”
Cohen’s other well-known songs include Suzanne, So Long, Marianne, Famous Blue Raincoat and The Future, an apocalyptic 1992 recording in which he darkly intoned: “I’ve seen the future, brother/It is murder.”
The inspiration for So Long, Marianne was Cohen’s longtime romantic partner and muse Marianne Ihlen, a Norwegian woman he met while living on the Greek island of Hydra in the 1960s.
Cohen toured extensively from 2008 to 2013 after being unable to collect most of a $9 million judgment against his former manager and lover, Kelley Lynch, whom he accused of draining his savings.
He released an album, You Want It Darker, just last month.
But the New Yorker described him as ailing, quoting him as saying he was more or less “confined to barracks” in his Los Angeles residence.
Cohen’s nasal voice and deep-bass, conversational vocals were criticised by some as being monotonous. British musician Paul Weller once called his melancholy style “music to slit your wrists to”.
But his work was also suffused with irony and selfdeprecating humour, often touching on his relationship with fame and his reputation for romantic entanglements.
“I got this rap as a kind of ladies’ man,” Cohen told Canada’s Globe and Mail in 2007. “And as I say in one of the poems, it has caused me to laugh, when I think of all the lonely nights.”
Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau described Cohen as “a most remarkable Montrealer” who had “managed to reach the highest of artistic achievement, both as an acclaimed poet and a worldrenowned singer-songwriter”.
Born into a Jewish family in 1934 and raised in an affluent English-speaking neighbourhood of the city, Cohen read Spanish poet Federico García Lorca as a teenager, learnt to play guitar from a flamenco musician and formed a country band called the Buckskin Boys.
He attended McGill University in Montreal and published his first book of poetry shortly after graduation.
In the 1960s Cohen published the poetry collections The Spice-Box of Earth and Flowers for Hitler and novels The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers.
But disillusioned with his meagre income, Cohen turned to songwriting and landed an audition in 1967 with John Hammond, the producer who had discovered Dylan. Hammond signed him to Columbia Records, which would remain Cohen’s label for five decades.
Cohen, who never married, is survived by his daughter, Lorca, and his son, Adam. – Reuters LOS ANGELES: Reality stars Blac Chyna and Rob Kardashian have welcomed their first child together.
The baby girl named Dream was born Thursday in Los Angeles.
She is the first child for Kardashian, 29. Blac Chyna has a 3-year-old son from a previous relationship.
The couple announced their engagement in April and pregnancy in May. The E! network said in June that it would track their relationship and baby preparations in a reality show called Rob & Chyna, which premiered in September. – ANA-AP NEW YORK: Former Wimbledon champion Maria Sharapova will be reinstated as a UN goodwill ambassador when her suspension from world tennis ends next April.
Sharapova, 29, was banned for two years in March by the International Tennis Federation after a test in January detected the banned drug meldonium. The ban was reduced to 15 months on appeal.
A UN spokesman said: “We will lift the suspension of her role as our goodwill ambassador once the reduced ban expires in April 2017.” – Daily Mail