2010: Leonard Cohen – Everybody Knows

2010, a year marked by deceit, disappointment and false hopes – and I’m only talking about my life.

Add to that the kamikaze crawl of the Global Financial Crisis (with the global economy dissolving into shredded aluminium after bumping off the runway for a brief optimistic glimmer), the bitter end of ‘Change We Can Believe In’, and most recently the revelations from Wikileaks that governments are as nefarious – more so even – than we always secretly feared they were.

Who better to turn to in this dark hour than Leonard Cohen, the so-called ‘poet laureate of pessimism’? (*)

‘Everybody Knows’ opens with a stream of folk cynicism – clichés of powerless like ‘Everybody knows that the dice are loaded / Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed’ and mottoes of melancholy like ‘Everybody got this broken feeling / Like their father or their dog just died’.

And its the repetition of the song’s title throughout the lyrics which makes it particularly prescient to this era where people are saturated with media, and events are covered in excruciating detail without anything actually changing, where knowledge isn’t power, but gifts only a kind of submissive cynicism.

What clangs loudest though is the way the narrator juxtaposes his weary observations of the corruption eating at society’s institutions with his own hurt and anger at a lover who has been ‘faithful, give or take a night or two’. Cohen is entirely in tune here with the fact that we always view the chaos of the outside world through the prism of our inner, personal horror.

I don’t even want to think of a song for 2011. Any ideas?

Then again, ‘Everybody Knows’ could be a song for the coming year too; after all, ‘Everybody knows that the Plague is coming / Everybody knows that it’s moving fast.

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(*) this is a quote refracted around the internet by writers using the passive tense so I couldn’t find the source anywhere.