Revisiting the albums of my youth: I’m Your Man

In my university years, my musical tastes started to stray from the pop charts, but mostly on a quest for the newest thing, and what was fun to dance to. The Sugarcubes, The Pogues and The Smiths, house-y hits like Inner City’s “Big Fun” and the slick delights of Black Box. If the band was British, like Fine Young Cannibals, or from Narnia, like the Cocteau Twins, so much the better. This was before Canadian music went global with the likes of Alanis, Shania and Celine. National acts like Glass Tiger, Corey Hart, Doug and the Slugs, and Haywire were starting to feel uncomfortably provincial. National treasure? I’d probably have said Anne Murray with an ironic laugh.

I had a roommate who played a passable guitar and I have to admit that I did not find his rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” compelling, no matter how many times he played it. Hippie Canadiana from the 1960s. Ugh. Even my admiration for Joni Mitchell leaned toward the overproduced Dog Eat Dog and the guest-laced Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm (Peter Gabriel! Don Henley! Billy Idol! So many indicators of global hitdom!) over Blue, which seemed like a quaint artifact (history loves proving people wrong). 

“Suzanne” was driven by little more than a plink-plunky guitar; no Thomas Dolby in sight. The voice was whiny. The lyrical imagery, I felt, was something between Medieval and “White Rabbit,” far beyond my experience and interest. I think my roommate also played me “Who by Fire,” which I found repetitive and naively romantic (not a good thing when you're in your early 20s). I have no memory of hearing “Hallelujah” in those days, which has come to be a song that I, along with the rest of the world, love. But if I had, I imagine I would have dismissed it as quickly as something by Gordon Lightfoot or any singer my dad might like.

So when Cohen’s 1988 album I’m Your Man started to filter into my consciousness, I was initially resistant. “Ain’t No Cure for Love,” the first song from it that I remember, had radio-friendly production—a little meh. But its chugging bassline reminded me of John Waite’s “Missing You (I Ain’t Missing You at All),” which I had liked a few years earlier. Yes, I am framing my discovery of Leonard Cohen, one of the last century’s towering artists, by way of a one-hit-wonder. But that’s how the process of musical discovery works.

The black and grey album-cover design was decidedly of the moment. But what was he doing, dressed in a suit and wearing sunglasses? Eating a banana? He was definitely an old guy. That was a strike against him. I wasn’t totally dismissive of music that was sought higher meaning and deeper emotions, that sought to qualify as poetry. I loved Bruce Cockburn (always timely). I loved Suzanne Vega (and still do). But Vega was only 10 years older than me, a wise older sister, really, whose sharp observations could be applicable to my own life. Cohen was definitely of my dad’s generation, though definitely not to my dad’s taste.

On I’m Your Man, the voice that had irritated me on “Suzanne” had grown deep, growly and menacing. The voice was so deep, it almost seemed capricious, like he was doing it on purpose, like Prince using his falsetto to bring other characters into a song. Now that kind of playfulness and pretence was appealing! I loved the band Shriekback for their tribal rhythms and primordial imagery (“We drink elixirs that we refine/ From the juices of the dying”) and The Cocteau Twins for their perverse avoidance of any lyrical sense. As an over-caffeinated student in my early 20s, I welcomed any sort of audacity.

It was probably “First We Take Manhattan” that sold me and built the foundation of my future Leonard Cohen fandom. The churning bass synth sounds seemed dated—but, I was realizing, knowingly so. The violins, the choir in the background, the fluttering sci-fi sounds were all apocalyptically over-the-top, allowing for another reading of Jennifer Warnes’s otherwise MOR vocals. This was like the devil’s misjudged attempt at huggable that ends up scorching its recipient.

Digging into the album, “Jazz Police” seemed to confirm my suspicious that the whole thing was a dark joke. (I remember being at a party and forcing people to wait in silence while I cued up the song over and over again on cassette, perhaps in an effort to drive my fellow students crazy.) The cheesy drum machines sounded as if someone was gleefully testing out how many beats their new Yamaha Portasound could jam into each measure. The silly high notes of the background vocalists, the lyrics about being mad about turtle meat. Here was an old geyser pulling a Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

In hindsight, I can see that only a couple of the songs were that wacky (Cohen took the grand apocalypticism even further on his 1992 follow up The Future), though it’s what got me hooked. Pushing past the leftfield production and getting used to the voice, I started to appreciate the lyrics. Oh, man, the lyrics. These days, I love Cohen’s poetry as much as his music. I chuckle at it. I memorize it. I try to learn from his poems even as they cleverly thwart any attempt to marshal them into a fixed world view, ideology or something you’d see on an inspirational poster.

Where the lyrics of “Suzanne” had seemed like a rambling chore (I’m still not a fan of it), every line on I’m Your Man was a potential quotable quote. There was built-in irony: “Everybody knows that you've been faithful/ Ah, give or take a night or two.” But there was knowingness a listener could bring along too. You can chuckle or feel wise at how a lover’s declaration of “I love your body and your spirit and your clothes” mixed the sacred and the shallow.

That very line is one I put to use back in my university years. “I love your body and your spirit and your clothes” is what I once said in reply to a classmate’s tender confession of a growing attraction for me. I sang the line a few times, warbling on “clothes.” At the time, it seemed like both a way forward and a way out. A sly reciprocity. Now I realize it was a way of being an ass without entirely betraying another person’s vulnerability.

Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man was simultaneously of this world and beyond it, a love letter to the human condition and an escape hatch from it. It's an album that divides his career into two halves, the first of which was, for me, merely a sketch for the masterpiece of the second. 

Revisiting the albums of my youth: Super Trouper

Released in 1979, ABBA’s Greatest Hits Vol. 2 was, in my home, generally acknowledged to be my father’s album, though anybody in the family might open the gatefold and crank up “Does Your Mother Know” or “Take a Chance on Me” to summon a quorum in the living room. It was perhaps the first album I recognized as a family endeavour, like Disney World or cross-country skiing. Until then, my father listened mostly to country music, which I hated.

Jump ahead two years and ABBA’s The Visitors was most emphatically my album (returned twice because it kept skipping during “One of Us.” But Super Trouper, the biggest selling album of 1980, was the album that my father bought and seldom listened to, while my sister, three years younger, and I ate it up like roast beef after a famine. To this day, I can easily lip sync most of it, even the songs I disliked.

Super Trouper was not my favourite ABBA album. That was, you guessed it, The Visitors, ABBA’s mic drop, their last waltz, something to decode and obsess over. Having discovered Super Trouper among my father’s collection rather than buying it myself, it took a while for it to work its way into my consciousness. I was first pulled in by the cover. Dressed all in white, Benny, Bjorn, Freda and Agnetha were circled by an array of moody circus performers, swathed in dim amber light. The superstars had come off stage to be worshipped and to cavort with their adoring, though much lesser, co-performers. The young man holding the torch in the foreground seemed ready to lead everyone to darker places. It wasn’t quite sinister or sexual, but hinted at both.

The first single was “The Winner Takes It All,” but this was the era of albums, where you made up your own mind what the best tracks were. Plus “The Winner Takes It All,” about a divorce, had mature subject matter. Adults seems to get tense when it played. It was not “fun” ABBA the whole family could share, though eventually we discovered that campy enactments of the lyrics could be quite delightful.

As a family, the consensus that the best song was “On and On and On.” Its chorus and honky-tonk piano were grounded in rock and roll, which my parents appreciated. But the story-telling lyrics that gave me great joy caused them some consternation. The word “Hell” was not appreciated by my mother. I can see now that the words painted too vivid a portrait of urban moral contingency. The party where the world unfolded was not one you’d want your kids at. “I was at a party and this fella said to me/Something bad is happening, I’m sure you do agree/People care for nothing, no respect for human rights/Evil times are coming, we are in for darker nights.” But at 12, I was starting to appreciate the idea of a cold, smartass comeback. “I said I was not exactly waiting for the bus” seemed like the perfect answer to “What’s our situation, do we have some time for us?” even though the sexual connotations of the question went way over my head.

The title track, too, was alienating to someone who wasn’t a global citizen. The chorus’s chugging bass was fun to crank loud, but who wants to listen to the complaints of a planetary superstar?

The Super Trouper song that totally alienated my parents was the one my sister and I loved the most. Or, I should say, most loved to perform. “Me and I” was not just a song, but a theatrical production. The opening synths seemed like explicit instructions to a stage manager where to direct the spotlights, which we, as super troupers, could walk in and out of as we pleased. The relentless beat made it easy to synchronize our moves, the wobbly bass created it a sense of suspense that covered missteps and unsuccessful improvisations.

Growing up in a rather sheltered rural environment, I had little awareness of mental illness until I was in my late teens. So my pure delirium at lines like, “Part of me is acting while the other stands beside/Yes, I am to myself what Jekyll must have been to Hyde” was independent of the cultural presentation of split personalities. But I must have heard the Bee Gees in the “Hy-y-Y-Y-HYDE!” My parents must may have been turned off by the song’s disco influences, too far from country or rock and roll, in it. Or maybe it was just the silly behaviour it brought out in their kids that made them tell us to turn the song down and stop making the whole house shake with our jumping.

Four of Super Trouper’s 10 tracks are ballads, the spinach of a 12 year old’s musical taste. “The Way Old Friends Do” was something you’d hear at a wedding dance you didn’t want to be at. My sister loved “Andante Andante,” but it put me to sleep. I didn’t even know what the title meant. I liked the clever, hook-filled songs that were for and about nightclubs, not the ones set in a meadow. Their “pretty” songs have always left me cold.  

With its jet-setting ennui, Super Trouper was not an album for kids, nor was it an album for adults who considered “Mamma Mia” the pinnacle of ABBA’s achievements. But for a 12 year old yearning for something to expand his world, it was worth rooting through the kitsch to find something unapologetically modern, cosmopolitan and curious.

Revisiting the albums of my youth: Zooropa

Music makes its deepest mark on us when we’re young; there’s no favourite song like the one we had when we were, say, 15 in the middle of our first crush.

Some of those early music revelations we carry forward, going back to listen to our personal classics again and again (for me, Mark Knopfler’s Local Hero soundtrack), or following the bands we adopted then through their various iterations and reinventions (Pet Shop Boys, New Order).

At the very least, our youthful music catalogue determines our taste later in life. As someone shaped to my core by brightly imagined 1980s acts like Thompson Twins, ABC and, a little later, Prefab Sprout and Deacon Blue,  the time-travelling neo-’80s sound of Alphabeat, Cut Copy, Capital Cities and Penguin Prison in the last decade has been like a dear friend coming back from the dead.

Some music doesn’t attach so tightly to us. We buy albums (we bought albums—this is the streaming age now, I know) during a particular time and place in our lives, with a particular set of contextual motivations that mean much less later on. Hype or an affection for the last record send us rushing out to plunk our hard-earned money down for something we hadn’t heard and, damn it, we were going to love it. Or feel betrayed. An album that seems like a revelation when we buy it can eventually sound like a dated dud, or vice versa.

I decided to go back into my CD and cassette collection (my mother got rid of my albums back in the 1990s during a major yard sale purge) to listen to things that I had set aside after my first infatuation, just to see if there was any lingering feelings of affection or resentment.

Back in 1993, I remember sending two friends who I knew from my university years a missive that somewhere stated that U2’s Zooropa “changes everything.” I want to believe it was a CC email, but since I wasn’t on the Internet until 1994, it must have been a letter I printed, copied and mailed. Neither of the recipients shared my enthusiasm; they didn’t argue back one way or the other and it was at this point I started to doubt our friendship.

I had avidly followed U2 since 1984’s The Unforgettable Fire—even now I can only listen to The Joshua Tree album when I am emotionally grounded enough to handle an intense rush of teenage nostalgia. While other bands had laid claim on my desire to dance or my sense of humour or my romantic side, U2 occupied the most existential chamber of my heart. By the time Zooropa came along, though, they were starting to feel too earnest to be as slick and clever as I wanted to be in my early 20s. My letter signalled that I wanted U2 to still be relevant, but also that I had reservations that that was so.

Listening now, “changes everything” was certainly naïve and definitely an overstatement. Sure, the grainy, lime green and hot pink digital imagery of the glossy CD booklet signalled a shift in U2’s image, which had until this time been etched in wood, stone and rust, smeared with dust and blood. The purposeful tackiness signalled a new ephemerality. The Unforgettable Fire may have been for the ages, but Zooropa came with a best-before date.

For U2 at the time, all the production tricks—the sound effects, the distortion, the bleeps and bloops, the non sequitur intro and extros—seemed bold and mysterious. In retrospect, the production was not much more aggressive than their previous album, Achtung Baby, which has sold more over time and is regarded with much more affection than Zooropa. (I probably listen to it more now than any other U2 album.) Zooropa had less sweat and grit, so was another small step away from U2’s core sensibility. But compared to today’s producer-driven chart-toppers, Zooropa still allows you hear each band member’s instrument as an instrument. The synth fuzz rarely gets in the way of The Edge’s guitar, Adam Clayton’s bass and Larry Mullen Jr.’s drums. It would be another six years before producers autotuned Cher for her Believe album; Bono’s singing is pretty much what it was on U2’s seven previous studio albums.

While Achtung Baby seemed to have placed every sound in its right place, Zooropa’s sonic texture, designed by Flood, Brian Eno and The Edge, comes across as sloppy to the point of contemptuous of the songs themselves. Which might have worked better if the songs were stronger. U2’s catalogue to that point was full of singalong classics. Quirky as it was, Achtung Baby was a genuine karaoke carnival: “One,” “The Fly,” “Mysterious Way,” “Even Better than the Real Thing.” As far as melody goes, Zooropa offers little to sink one’s teeth into. Beneath the layers of production, it now feels like a roundup of Achtung Baby B-sides tarted up to hide their deficiencies. The title track is supremely blah, even as it echoes their most anthemic work.

My choice for most appealing song, “Numb,” is a mumbled rap that only works as karaoke if you or your singing partner can pull off the chorus’ falsetto. The mumble/falsetto schtick also carries the next track, “Lemon,” making the songs feel like a two-for-one package, a charming “concept album” conceit that hints that neither is able to stand on its own.

On the first few listens back in 1993, I remember being fascinated by “Daddy’s Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car.” Perhaps for its grinding audaciousness, its strangely undanceable proximity to electronic dance music. It’s a song that’s constructed, not inspired. Now it seems like pure novelty, along the lines of Prince’s “Batdance.”

Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson and Mariah Carey were diva-ing away at the top of the singles charts in 1993, but so was Robin S. with “Show Me Love,” and Snap! with “Rhythm Is a Dancer.” Pop music was breaking into piece, with the dancey singles part getting much fluffier and, on the album-driven side of things, Nirvana, The Smashing Pumpkins, Wu-Tang Clan and Pearl Jam bringing on the heavy. At this time of my life, still going to nightclubs, I was definitely siding with the lighter stuff.

We tend to rebel against the music of our parents, which for me was country and western. So the guest of appearance of Johnny Cash on “The Wanderer” was a factor I could not overlook. My rationalization: The song was a joke, its fat, artificially squishy bass-line making fun of Cash’s existential doom. With a more seasoned taste, I can now hear the song as U2 trying desperately to add something—anything—to the force of nature that is Cash, before whom they were bowing down in homage. Perhaps the weirdly awkward production which placed quotation marks around Cash's appearance (he's credited as “starring” in “The Wanderer”), was what started me down the road to eventually appreciating him as a music legend, a hidden trigger that caused an explosion decades later. 

Though Zooropa may have signalled the end of U2’s cultural dominance, they were still gliding along at the height of their global commercial success. The band could pick and choose the best of what everyone else was doing, or zig when everyone else was zagging. Zooropa is a cocky album, but you can also hear it hedging its bets. That caution worked against the album as a reinvention, I think. The songs that were the U2y-ist, like “Stay (Faraway, So Close!)” and “The First Time” get more respectful and traditional treatment. Even if they’re weaker than other U2 hits, they wouldn’t be jarring on a compilation album. “Changes everything” was more of a business plan than a new chapter of artistry.

For me, Zooropa was a signal to move on. It was the last U2 album I bought. I was sad it had put me on the wrong side of the divide between me and the university friends I had written to about it.

U2 would never be as playful as Björk, who has burst onto the scene and seemed to be able to harness philosophizing to goofiness and danceability. And they had seemingly given up on their desire to be grand and inspiring. (Though they did reclaim that on later albums.) For earnestness, I held onto Sting, though I was not included to proclaim my affection for him to my peers. He, too, was starting to feel a little embarrassing, a little too much like dad music.

That seemed to be the fight Zooropa lost—to not be music your dad would listen to. But I didn't take to it in my early 20s, and I am not much more fond of it now that I'm dad-aged.