Anyway, I think this is a similar divide to the performances of ‘Hurt’ by Nine Inch Nails and Johnny Cash. People come to each with their own preconceptions and their own taste, and ultimately both tracks explore different ground and express different things through the same composition.

It is all a matter of taste; for what it’s worth, I think no one has to think something is good, but I have a lot of time for people whose sense of taste lets them explore the ground that the artist tries to take them to and understand the artist on their level, whether they think one particular performance is better or worse than another by some metric.

Only good an bad

Here's an example:

=== May 26, 2023 20:33

I worked in Dnipro last year in October and November as first responder for missile strikes (kamikaze drones weren’t a big issue yet in Dnipro at that time, missiles were the main threat), and therefore any news and pictures of an attack there feel very personal to me. They’re not just another headline about another strike to me, but bring back memories from the strikes that I responded to myself and the experiences I made.

Coming from these experiences, let me remind you, or make you aware, that these attacks cause much more harm than what you see on the news pictures or that the numbers show of how many people died or are hospitalized or how many buildings got destroyed.

For example, last year I rescued (‘found cowering on the ground’ would be more fitting in this case actually) a young woman who was close-ish to a half collapsed and burning gas station that was hit by a missile. She had a wound from a piece of shrapnel on her hand, that was all. It wasn’t serious, no bones, nerves, ligaments etc. were damaged, a case for a bandage as first aid and later a few stitches in the hospital. She didn’t even have a serious concussion as far as I could tell on the spot, apparently, luckily, she was still far enough away from the impact for it to cause her any serious physical damage. But she was severely in shock, I mean psychological shock. She looked at me like… I don’t even know how to describe this but I’ll never forget this look in her eyes… like in complete disbelief of what just happened or confusion about what happened, mixed with deep sadness, mixed with fear for her life. Something like this. She was traumatized, and the same applied to everybody who was there when it happened, no matter whether or not they had physical injuries.

Another time we were searching a damaged building right next to a partially destroyed building (from a missile strike). It was basically still intact, 'only’ blown out windows and smaller damage like that from the shockwave and from shrapnel /secondary shrapnel flying around, but no collapsed walls or other visible damage that would affect the building’s structural integrity. “Searching” in this case means we had to check on every single person living there if they need medical help, and/or enter every single apartment, if necessary by force, to see if anybody is there who needs assistance. Everybody in this building was 'fine’, there were no dead, no injured (beyond a few scratches or minor cuts from window glass), no unattended frightened children or elderly, nobody who would’ve needed our help, aside from a bandaid or a piece of candy (for the kids) here and there. These people wouldn’t show up in any statistics that you see on the news, they’re the 'lucky’ ones, but if you talk to them in person there’s no doubt that they’re also direct victims of this missile strike. - If you talk to people later who have experienced something like this, they’ll tell you that their children are deadly afraid of all kinds of banging sounds and of the air raid alert sirens, they run to the hallway (if you don’t have a basement, or one that can’t be reached quickly, that’s where you would go, away from the windows and outer parts of the building but some windowless hallway deeper inside preferably in a doorframe) if they sense the slightest sign of danger, or what they interpret as danger. Everybody gets paranoid of the sky, and people don’t feel safe in their own homes, their own beds, anymore.

Then there are of course the people who lose their homes because of these strikes, some of them might be unharmed themselves if they weren’t home, but they’ve lost everything.

And that’s only the people who are directly affected. Then you have all the secondary damage (or tertiary, or where are we now..) that comes from destroyed infrastructure. A strike might have been relatively far away from you, but you can’t get to work anymore because your train can’t drive (destroyed railroads), you don’t have warm water to bathe your baby because the water boiler doesn’t work without electricity (destroyed power stations, or lines), or you have no water at all anymore (destroyed water facilities, or pipes), or your grampa has a heart attack but it takes an eternity for the ambulance to arrive (destroyed hospitals or ambulances), or you can’t go to work because nobody can take care of your kids anymore (destroyed kindergartens), and so on.

And on top you have a whole neighborhood, city, a whole country, who, even if they’ve never been near any missile strikes and aren’t affected at all (yet), who live in constant fear that the next missile could have their name on it, or their family’s or friend’s. And the people who are grieving because they’ve lost somebody in a missile strike. And the loss of buildings and cities that have a decades or centuries old history and have become part of the culture of a district or region. The list is endless, but you get the idea.

Russia has launched _thousands_ of missiles on Ukraine since Feb 2022, the vast majority of them targeted at civilians. This air strike terror that Ukraine is going through - and it really is a form of terrorism, it meets all the defining characteristics - has effects far beyond the immediate casualties from the actual missile strikes, that you can’t even imagine.

Even for me it felt 'special’, in a bad way, when a missile hit very close to my building while I was standing on the balcony having a smoke, last year in October in Dnipro. And I had just come back from months of daily bombardments with almost everything, short of missiles, that the Russian military has to offer, so at that point I was pretty much as used to this experience as anybody can possibly get. But there’s a difference between daily life airstrikes in the context of frontline work, where you don’t expect anything else, and getting hit by a missile in a big city far away from the front that suddenly out of the blue, literally out of the blue, disrupts your normal life. At the front you never feel safe by default, but in the middle of Dnipro going to the gas station, or having a smoke, you don’t expect this. Even right now in Ukraine you don’t, because your brain protects you from constantly being afraid as good as it can. Even I was in shock there for a moment before I grabbed my medic bag and gear (rescuers here wear body armor because Russians like to hit the same spot twice exactly to get the rescuers too) to go downstairs and help, and i can only imagine how much worse it must be for people who are completely unprepared for this.

This airstrike terror is a_ huge_ part of this war, that Westerners aren’t really aware of in this form. If you compare the numbers of soldiers dying in Bakhmut alone, let alone the whole frontline, versus civilians who died from missile strikes, or kamikaze drones, it looks like it’s a minor issue, in the bigger picture. But it isn’t, because it’s not just about the dead and injured.

Those of you who have grandparents who experienced some kind of bombardment during WW2 might now, that some of them are still not over it after decades, after decades of living in a safe place in a peaceful country. My grandmother had a friend who made this experience _once_, for _one_ day, as a kid, and as an 80 something year old woman looked like a frightened little girl stuck in the past when she told me about it. That’s how deep the wounds can be that people suffer from being victim of this kind of terror. And Ukraine is experiencing this for over a _year_ now, with no end in sight. I know it’s not the exact same kind of thing, but the effects on people are similar.

I really hope that the generational trauma that this will cause can be turned into something good eventually and will make Ukrainians stronger in the end. But that might be naive, honestly… I hope it’s not.

I see what you did there :-)

> a few "stars" and legions of impoverished artists is hard to shake.

Arguably "winner takes all" economies are a very common end-point in many disciplines - not just music / the arts.

Since turnabout is fair play, it’s worth noting this is mostly false; if you google “minor fall music theory” you’ll only find references to Cohen.

In (conventional western) analysis, a “fall” wouldn't be something mechanical, it would always imply a contextual interpretation.

So it’s a valid reading of the text to say it means something about the chord structure, but — from a purely musical theoretical perspective — just as valid to read it as a reference to the flattening of the minor degree of the scale, or something else entirely.

It’s really a lovely song :)

It was definitely not obvious to me! What do you make of the third chord under ‘composing’ that would not be playable in a diatonic (?) scale that was used at the time of King David, as the video claims?

I have read 100's of fiction books and would be hard pressed to recall even 10% of their respective protagonists. I read Dunces once, maybe 15 years ago, and can recall the disgust at that character immediately.

He's a poet. And a writer. He never claimed to be a singer, and songwriting always was a side job that earned money. If you want to know how talented Cohen was, read instead of trying to listen.

(I don't really see "a tale of hedonism" in it, either. I mean, it has sex in it, for sure, but that's not the same thing. It's a song of damaged and broken relationships, not of consequence-free one-night stands.)

[EDITED to add:] That last sentence is an oversimplification. There are lots of versions of the song, even if you consider only Cohen's own ones, with different balances between the religious and the sexual/romantic elements; the original 1984 version isn't "a song of damaged and broken relationships", or at least not only that. You could even, kinda-sorta, call it "uplifting". Later versions, Cohen's and others, not so much.

But none of them, so far as I know, is a "tale of hedonism" in any useful sense.

> My point is that a line gets crossed when the intent is to create something that's not respectful and people somehow misinterpret it as an endorsement.

Not sure what you mean. That Cohen was disrespectful to the biblical sources? The man doesn't use so much of that kind of symbolism in his songs if he doesn't feel a deep connection to it, and Cohen uses a lot of it, consistently. And, I think, he already answers this question in the song itself - what's "the line"? Where does it come from?

(I suppose the name of the song itself is literally blasphemous, but I don't think this is what you meant?)

What is your basis for calling it blasphemous?

I must say I find it slightly hard to believe that this isn't obvious - but I hope this explanation clarifies things.