A Leonard Cohen afterworld
But baby I’ve been here before
I’ve seen this room and I’ve walked this floor
- Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah”
[I’m exploring 100 podcasts and writing what I learn. This is No. 35.]
There’s a scene described in Malcolm Gladwell’s new podcast where songwriter Leonard Cohen is “in a hotel room in his underwear banging his head on the floor.”
His problem? He’s frustrated while working on a song called “Hallelujah.” Cohen would continue to struggle with the lyrics and composition for five years before finally recording his song.
In the meantime, Bob Dylan meets up with Cohen in Paris and offers encouragement.
“A fascinating part of this story is that really the first person who paid attention to ‘Hallelujah’ as an important song was Bob Dylan,” says Alan Light, author of an entire book about the song “Hallelujah.”
Cohen’s tortured artist model is what Gladwell points to as an example for “experimental innovation” or “experimental genius,” where mastery follows an exceeding amount of trial and error.
But the song still didn’t become a hit. It only resurfaced after a series of historical accidents led Jeff Buckley to discover a cover of the song, record his own version and perform it in a bar where a record label rep heard it. Only after Buckley’s untimely death did it become a mainstay.
Maybe this sounds familiar.
To me, these events remind me of common themes in Gladwell’s career. There’s the 10,000 hour rule and the role of luck from “Outliers,” the desirable disadvantages that help create legends from “David and Goliath,” and the sequence of how ideas spread from “The Tipping Point.”
Gladwell gonna Gladwell.
Malcolm Gladwell’s 10-episode podcast is called Revisionist History: “Because sometimes the past deserves a second chance.” In each episode, Gladwell examines an event, a person or an idea and reinterprets it from different angles.
And those angles are Gladwell angles. They’re seen from his personal vantage point and biases, which Gladwell often readily acknowledges.
“I’m interested in understanding how creativity works, and I’ve chosen (Elvis Costello’s) The Deportees Club as my case study for the completely, arbitrary reason that I’m obsessed with it,” he says at the beginning of the new episode. He also mentions how Cohen is a fellow Canadian and covers of his song “bring down the house” on Canada Day.
Hearing Gladwell talk about his familiar topics reminded me of a recent podcast with another one of my other favorite pop-intellectual writers, Chuck Klosterman.
In an interview with Marc Maron, Klosterman says he “accepts” that he “can’t really control” what he thinks. He says the way he thinks about things “is almost built into you and then kind of shaped by society.”
“And then once you realize that you’re trapped in this position,” he says, “the whole idea is getting out of that trap.”
This is, of course, a paradox. Klosterman thinks he can’t control what he thinks. He’s forced to use his mind to escape the trap of his mind. Is that possible?
I started Klosterman’s new book, “But What If We’re Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past.” It’s a lot like Revisionist History in that it questions the past, brings previously held truths into the light and autopsies them through new context and angles.
Klosterman’s theme is that if the past is difficult to understand, the present and future are even harder to grasp. How can we know what we don’t know?
He acknowledges that his task is probably impossible. Chapter 3 starts: “A brief examination as to why this book is hopeless.”
Klosterman believes the future isn’t just something that’s a little different than today. It’s something we can’t even conceive. He says we should be prepared to let go of everything that we fundamentally believe about the world — including the law of gravity. Everything is subject to revision.
This isn’t a new concept for Klosterman. Six years ago, he wrote the forward to a book called “The Advanced Genius Theory: Are They Out of Their Minds or Ahead of Their Time?” This theory holds that genius artists are so talented that when we think they’ve “lost it” they actually created work that is so great we haven’t created a framework to appreciate it yet. It’s an explicit acknowledgement that we don’t know what we don’t know.
Among the artists that are purportedly Advanced Geniuses? Leonard Cohen and Elvis Costello.
Which brings us back to Gladwell.
At one point, Gladwell talks about becoming “obsessed” with Elvis Costello’s “Deportee” after a friend gives him a mixtape for his birthday. Gladwell says he sings “parts of it to myself almost every single day” and “I don’t really know why, but it might be one of my favorite songs ever.”
“There’s a line it in it that jumps into my head whenever I’m sad — it’s so perfect. A little couplet about the dissolution of romantic love,” he said, before breaking into song:
“And you don’t know where to start or where to stop.
All this pillow talk is finally talking shop.”
This might be the most personal thing I’ve ever heard from Gladwell.
Revising history is about tweaking the context of history to see it in a certain worldview. It’s about constructing narratives that make sense to you, whether that’s Advanced Genius Theory or the 10,000 Hours Rule or why you like a certain song.
In many ways, the topics in Revisionist History are secondary. It’s really about how Gladwell interprets the world.
And how we’re all forever trapped in our own world.
