“I’m Your Man” by Leonard Cohen (1988) This album does not disappoint on any level. Leonard Cohen’s strong poetic lyrics on this record are, as always, deeply immersive. With scrappy and sometimes scattered allusions that successfully beg for the listener’s thoughtful reflection, his songs are always perfectly cadenced and well synthesized, each one tied together by unifying (and frequently quite dark) themes. From the understated horror of the pretense of normality in the midst of a plague (AIDS, in “Everybody Knows”) to the tortured feelings of a man who still loves a woman he knows he’ll never get back (“I’m Your Man”), to the insidious insertions of jazz riffs into pop fusion compositions (“Jazz Police”), Cohen is consistently intriguing. The musical settings all sustain interest (although “Take This Waltz” struggles in this department). And all are capably performed by Cohen, with his signature croaky baritone, and his excellent backing musicians. But the song that commands all the attention on this album is the opening track “First We Take Manhattan”. Cohen himself called it “a terrorist song”—a ballsy response to the (anti-Semitic/anti-Israel) terrorism that was growing in the 1980’s. From the 1970 Munich bus attack to the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre to the 1980 Munich Oktoberfest bombing to the 1982 bombing attack at Berlin’s Mifgash-Israel restaurant to the 1985 Frankfurt Airport bombing, Jews in the West had understandably had enough. In response to that physically violent terrorism (for which he had a qualified respect), Cohen offered this song as an act of retaliatory ‘psychic terrorism’: “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin”. In an interview, Cohen explained the song with an analogy to a poem by his friend and mentor Irving Layton (“Terrorists” in The Pole-Vaulter, Toronto, 1974) which he paraphrased: “Well, you guys blow up an occasional airline and kill a few children here and there, But our terrorists, Jesus, Freud, Marx, Einstein. The whole world is still quaking...”. The references to “you guys” and “our” should be obvious. The sentiment that Cohen inherits and alters (from Layton’s poem: “Jewish terrorists, ah: Maimonides, Spinoza, Freud, Marx”) is that while anti-Semitic terrorism kills the body, Jewish ‘terrorism’ changes the cultural soul (cf. Matthew 10:28). [Hat tip to Prof. Louis Schwartz of the University of Richmond for the Irving Layton poem connection]. Now whatever one thinks of this hyper-volitional notion of cultural “Jewish terrorism” Leonard Cohen delivers it both vocally and musically with shudderingly haunting power. Cosmic, apocalyptic, militaristic, and almost gleefully anticipatory of the moment of vengeance, Cohen’s lyric calls us to take stock of the world soul in the midst of this conflict. You don’t want to go there. But maybe you have no choice. This one track, “First We Take Manhattan”, is reason enough to listen to I’m Your Man, not just for entertainment, but for insight, no matter whose ‘side’ you’re on. 5/5