Was Leonard Cohen a better fit for the Nobel Prize than Bob Dylan?

 

Just last year after Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, that other great literary songwriter, Leonard Cohen, died at the age of 82.

"Even if a musician deserves the noble prize for literature it can't be Bob, not when Leonard Cohen is there, this is daylight robbery, the Noble prize committee failed" these were the venom from the mouth of a friend; a literary enthusiast upon hearing the winner of the noble prize for literature last year. Those words made me to embark on a little assignment to find out  if my friend was right and the noble prize committee was wrong

Funny enough that was my first time hearing of Bob Dylan. Before the noble prize i knew nothing about him or his music, one can blame that on the generation gap between us.

But i have always been fascinated by Leonard Cohen and his spoken word, his popular hit single "Hallelujah" remains one of my all time favourite songs. Despite the generation gap between his music and myself, its just like Bob Marley, even coming generation will still be amazed when they listen to his song

When Dylan's Nobel was announced, a number of commentators claimed that Cohen would have been a more appropriate choice. One can see why.

Cohen's long career has shown him to be a master songwriter, producing wry, literate, and melancholy lyrics for 50 years.

Cohen also began in the literary field, producing four collections of poems and two novels before his debut album, The Songs of Leonard Cohen, in 1967.

In fact, Cohen's literary career made him an unlikely success in the music scene of the late 1960s, as did other factors.

He had an haute-bourgeois background; he had wanted as a child to attend a military school; and he had a BA from McGill, and had begun a higher degree at Columbia (the university, not the record label).

Most of all, he was not young. When Songs of Leonard Cohen was released, Cohen was 33 years old, having spent the previous decade building, with mixed success, his literary reputation.

While Cohen continued sporadically to produce books after 1967, his musical career is what he is best known for.But there is a notable continuity between Cohen's poems and his song lyrics.The themes, tone, and style of Cohen's songs were already largely in place in his early poetry.

His poems, like his songs, eschew complexity when it comes to form and word choice, and they focus — like the songs — on eroticism, death and loss, and redemption.

Cohen's early albums, Songs of Leonard Cohen, Songs from a Room (1969), and Songs of Love and Hate (1970) — the latter arguably his most realised album — are no doubt the basis for the idea that Cohen wrote depressing songs.

However, while a melancholy tone can be found throughout his career, Cohen is surprisingly mercurial. In a number of his songs, there is self-mockery and a dark, dry sense of humour.

At a lyrical level, the note of self-mockery comes out in songs such as Dress Rehearsal Rag (from Songs of Love and Hate), in which the poet views himself in the following terms:

Just take a look at your body now,

There's nothing much to save.

And a bitter voice in the mirror cries,

'Hey, Prince, you need a shave.'

Interests in Buddhism, hypnotism

Outwardly, Cohen's lyrics were more straightforward than Dylan's — certainly the Dylan of the mid 60s.

Yet within his apparently simple words lies a profound sense of playfulness and enigma, apparent in the song that arguably became his most famous, Hallelujah.

A religious language was never far from the surface in Cohen's songs, and one of the more unlikely developments in Cohen's long career was his becoming a Buddhist monk.

So it is appropriate, then, that the abiding sense that comes from his songs and his style of singing is that of a cloistered voice coming out of the dark, offering words that bring together the spiritual and material worlds.

Song writing as a literary art

This mesmeric sense is key to Cohen's musical and literary success. to be mesmeric one has to be consistent, and consistency was a key feature of Cohen's career. unlike Dylan, he didn't try to reinvent himself and while his musical accomplishment changed a little in terms of technology used, it remained the same in spirit: repetitive and basically traditional accomplishment to Cohen's mesmerizing baritone

Was Leonard Cohen a better fit for the Nobel Prize than Bob Dylan? 

You will be the best judge for that, just download their songs and compare.