“You Want it Darker” : the farewell song of Leonard Cohen – The World

” I’m out of the game, ” sang four times, Leonard Cohen on his last album. He is taken at his word.

World | 11.11.2016 at 10h17 • updated 11.11.2016 at 10h58 | By Aureliano Tonet

in the past, the Canadian had already staged his death, he seemed to even take some joy, some vitality : listen A Singer Must Die (1974), Death of a Ladies Man (1977), or even Tower of Song (1988), you will hear a man a shudder of the possibility of its finitude, comfortable and awe mingled.

So, why dwell on this double double ? Because it is a farewell song, and that it does not go away no matter how when we wrote Hey That’s No Way to Say Goodbye. It heals its output. This one looks like him : Cohen leaves us with one last challenge, beautiful player, teacher and singer.

there covenants in some desert secret, with David Bowie, Prince, Bob Dylan and others ? They have agreed to make 2016 a ceremony in the former, a “Old Ceremony ” where the Sky, way casino croupier, as a way out of his hat to the great deceased to the random dice rolls ? They have taken the bets, attempting, by an apparition surreptitious last – minute album release, a concert, a Nobel prize –, to outwit fate ? The Canadian has-t-he waited for the election, on the eve of his death, the joker Trump (“ If you’re the dealer,/I’m out of the game “) to withdraw on a ultimate poker game ?

” I’m out of the game. “If the verse sounds so right, it is that it summarizes to perfection the art of the game way Cohen, the issues of his poetry, simple, direct and playful, never shy, always bold. Literary genius ? in Who knows. Engineering literal, surely he knows as person to take him at his word, to hang himself to them.

Some songs are ransom ; arranged in a square of aces, these ” I’m out of the game “ would be I’m your man (1988), where he took the set in love with an amused voice : I was your man, I am not any more, there is nothing to follow, nothing more. Cohen leaves the table, neither winner, nor defeated, he can no longer play, he doesn’t want to play, then he gets out of the race, out of the game. Thus, he decided, so be it : the last wishes of the poet, eternal vitality of his poetry.