June 30, 2022 On Music A Laborer Called a Writer: On Leonard Cohen By Carina del Valle Schorske Mount Baldy in clouds. Photograph by josephmachine. Licensed under CC0 4.0. To mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Begin Again” in our Summer issue, we’re publishing a series of short reflections on his life and work. On “Tower of Song” (1988), Leonard Cohen’s weary croak cracks the joke: “I was born like this / I had no choice / I was born with the gift of a golden voice.” He can’t quite sustain his own melody, but some of us remain enchanted—and not merely by his self-effacement. The irony, we suspect, involves us, too. Choicelessness is one of his great themes: we don’t choose our blessings or our deficits, and we don’t choose our material conditions. Fine. But Leonard Cohen takes it further: maybe we can’t even control the impulse to defy our deficits, to work against the grain of what we’ve been given. We feel sentenced to sing even without a golden voice—by our own unruly desires, or by “twenty-seven angels from the great beyond.” The metaphorical cause matters less than the effect: “They tied me to this table right here in the Tower of Song.” Read More
June 28, 2022 On Music The Other Side of Pleasure: On Leonard Cohen By Daniel Poppick Photo copyright gudenkoa, via Adobe Stock. To mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Begin Again” in our Summer issue, we’re publishing a series of short reflections on his life and work. If apocalypse were at hand, would you choose to light a seventy-dollar Bois Cire scented candle by your bed and leaf through a Penguin Classics copy of George Herbert’s The Temple as the air conditioner ran on high, “Who By Fire” playing softly on your phone, the world slowly sifting itself down to ash? Some of us might. Some of us would. Leonard Cohen embraced the spiritual and the carnal, and his aching insistence on chasing pleasure at the edges of oblivion has made his voice ever more seductive—comforting, troubling—since his death in 2016. Read More
June 27, 2022 On Music Passing Through: On Leonard Cohen By Andrew Martin To mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Begin Again” in our Summer issue, we’re publishing a series of short reflections on his life and work. When Leonard Cohen starts singing “Passing Through” on his 1973 Live Songs album, he sounds tentative, like a child who’s been asked to sing a song he learned at school in front of a party of adults. “I saw Jesus on the cross, on a hill called calvary …” On the record his voice is faint—I’ve spent twenty years turning up the volume—and he sings so casually that it sounds like he really might have seen the crucified Christ, and asked him, deadpan and impertinent, “Do you hate mankind, for what he’s done to you?” Jesus has a pretty mellow, Jesus-like response, delivered in Cohen’s increasingly confident baritone: “He said ‘Talk of love not hate—things to do, it’s getting late.’” He is, like the rest of the Biblical and historical characters Cohen will encounter throughout the song, only passing through. Compare Cohen’s line readings to the declamatory, bugged-out delivery that Dylan gives to the opening lines of his bible pastiche “Highway 61 Revisited.” Cohen is calm, weary, a little resigned; Dylan is providing color commentary at the Belmont Stakes. Read More
June 23, 2022 On Music A Brighter Kind of Madness: On Leonard Cohen By Ottessa Moshfegh Leonard Cohen. Photograph by Rama. Licensed under CCO 2.0. To mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Begin Again” in our Summer issue, we’re publishing a series of short reflections on his life and work. In 2002, the year I graduated from college, I had a young male psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian who called me the night before every session to confirm our appointment. I feel bad for this guy now. He was kind of clueless and innocent, and I tried to horrify him at every session with more and more outlandishly irreverent thoughts about life. I’m not sure why I did this—maybe just for my own entertainment. He used to tell me that he could decipher my moods based on my outfits—he could determine when I was depressed or activated or hadn’t been sleeping based on the color combinations I chose. This was a very confused, manic period for me, and I had developed a practice of dressing that followed something like an equation. One garment had to be the equivalent of garbage; disgusting T-shirts and track pants fit into that category. One garment had to be opulent and luxurious, like a sequin blazer or buttery leather pants. And one garment had to be ironic. This was the hardest category to fulfill because it was so subjective. Read More
May 6, 2022 On Music Watch the Staples Jr. Singers Perform Live at The Paris Review Offices By The Paris Review A.R.C. Brown, Annie Brown Caldwell, and Edward Brown. Photograph by Eliza Grace Martin. On the evening of Friday, April 22, the staff of the Review tidied our desks, tucked away our notebooks and computers, ordered pizza, and welcomed the nine members of the band known as the Staples Jr. Singers to our Chelsea office for a very special performance. The band’s music was introduced to us by our friends at Luaka Bop, who are today rereleasing the Staples Jr. Singers’ 1975 record, When Do We Get Paid. The Staples Jr. Singers (who named themselves after Mavis Staples) formed in 1969, when the original band members—A.R.C. Brown, Annie Brown Caldwell, and Edward Brown—were still teenagers; they sold that first, glorious record on the front lawn of their home in Aberdeen, Mississippi. Almost fifty years later, to celebrate the rerelease, the original members drove the seventeen hours from Aberdeen to New York City, children and grandchildren in tow, for a weekend of gigs in New York City. We at the Review were thrilled to host the band’s first-ever concert in the city, and we are delighted to share a clip from that performance with you.
November 10, 2021 On Music Roadrunning: Joshua Clover in Conversation with Alex Abramovich By Alex Abramovich and Joshua Clover Jonathan Richman around 1972, with Modern Lovers, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. What follows is part of an email exchange between Alex Abramovich and Joshua Clover about Jonathan Richman’s song “Roadrunner.” Their conversation takes the scenic route, beginning with a materialist definition of rock ’n’ roll and ending by arguing over the Velvet Underground (too ironic? Too elitist?). Along the way, they touch on the nature of influence, poetry versus criticism, art versus revolution, the specificity of rock ’n’ roll freedom, and what it means to drive with no way out. Read More