AN ALERT READER inquires whether I noticed the reference in a Letter to the Editor on Monday to the “self-depreciating” songs of Leonard Cohen. Yes, reader, I did. But unlike you, I’m not sure it was a misprint. Or if it was, I’m not sure that “self-depreciating” isn’t a more accurate term than the one intended.
It’s true that my copy of Contradictionary: An A — Z of Confusibles, Lookalikes, and Soundalikes does warn writers about the tendency to mix up “deprecate” (meaning “to express disapproval”, from the Latin deprecare, “to pray against“) and “depreciate” (“to lose value”, from the Latin pretiare, meaning “price“).
And all right, “self-deprecating” is the term usually used of Leonard Cohen and his songs. But then again, depreciation has also been one of his abiding themes.
From Famous Blue Raincoat (“The last time I saw you, you looked so much older/Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder”) to Tower of Song (“My friends are gone and my hair is grey/I ache in the places where I used to play”), he has often commented, humorously or otherwise, about physical decline.
In fact, in one of his earliest compositions – Who by Fire? – he adopted an old Jewish prayer about mortality, listing in rhetorical questions the different ways a person may die (“Who in the merry, merry month of May?/Who by very slow decay?”) with all the enthusiasm of a door-to-door life assurance salesman.
So self-depreciation is certainly a Cohen theme. But that being so, the irony is that both the song and their singer, if judged as capital assets, show no sign of losing their book value in the foreseeable accounting period.
Had Leonard Cohen been – for argument’s sake – a car, then in standard depreciation models he would have been reduced to scrap value by about 1967, at the latest. Whereas this coming Friday, he turns 78 – in rock star years, that’s 194 – still at the top of his game, in the midst of yet another world tour, and performing a new album.
Not even using the well-known “diminishing balance method” (he skips around the stage a lot and hasn’t fallen over yet) can his asset-value be deemed to have been reduced by wear-and-tear or obsolescence.
All right, I can hear the accountants among you referring me to the “light-bulb model” of depreciation, used of products that work perfectly until they fail.
Yes, I know, this is also called the “One Hoss Shay” model: the reference being to a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes about a horse-drawn cart so well made that none of its individual parts wear out until, one day, on its 100th birthday, they all simultaneously collapse.
Maybe that’s what will happen Cohen eventually. In the meantime, he continues to get a cheer every time he sings the lines: “I was born like this, I had no choice/I was born with the gift of a golden voice.” Which he clearly means in a self- deprecating – and possibly depreciating – way and which his audiences always agree is a joke, but which is in fact the truth, or nearly. Cohen’s voice may never have been exactly golden: not if we take the gold standard to be, for example, Roy Orbinson, or Pavarotti. Yet whatever it’s made of, it hasn’t degenerated any over a 50-year-long career.
On the contrary, it has just become even deeper, and hence more authoritative, so that he could have read out sections of the Dublin telephone directory on stage last week and it would have sounded like a profound reflection on the human condition.
'GOLDEN' IS CERTAINLYno exaggeration for the state of his voice when compared with that of another veteran singer-songwriter who has just produced a new album.
Bob Dylan has never been much given to either deprecation or depreciation, self-wise. In fact, he once claimed to have reversed the ageing process viz: “But I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now”. Despite which, his latest record sees a continuation of the fascinating – and seemingly endless – decline in the quality of his larynx.
Consequently, while most critics have been agreeing about the album’s brilliance, they also seem to have been caught up on in an unofficial contest to devise the best description of how rough his voice is.
Thus the Wall Street Journal called it “a gargle of a vocal”. A Philadephia reviewer saw that bid and raised it, suggesting Dylan had been “gargling with gravel”. And in a similar vein, the LA Times wondered if he’d been secretly “eating nuts and bolts for half a century”.
A Florida newspaper, rather imaginatively, dubbed his voice a “zombie bullfrog holler” The New York Times suggested it was a “raspy, phlegmy, bark”. Meanwhile, with typical concision, the tabloid NY Daily News diagnosed the sound in one word: “tubercular”.
I don’t know if I can add anything to that list. But several years ago, commenting on an earlier Dylan album, I said that his voice “made Ronnie Drew sound like a lead soprano with the Vienna Boy’s Choir”. Well, suffice to say it’s a bit rougher now.