Leonard Cohen "Everybody Knows" song

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So, there is this music “Everybody Knows” from Leonard Cohen that mix a lot of different meanings and messages. However there is a specific passage that makes reference to Our Lord and His Sacred Heart it seems. What do you make of it? What meaning do you think Cohen intended with it? Is it respectful or disrespecful towards Christ?

From Everybody Knows :

Everybody knows you’re in trouble/Everybody knows what you’ve been through

From the bloody cross on top of Calvary/To the beaches of Malibu.

Everybody knows it’s coming apart/Take one last look at this Sacred Heart

Before it blows/Everybody knows…
 
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Cohen is well known for using religious and Jesus imagery in many of his songs which are about life, relationships and the human condition. I don’t think he intends disrespect, but I’m also not interested in his world view and find most of his stuff somewhere between depressing, overdramatic, and boring.

There was an album by Todd Rundgren (who is one of my all-time favorite musical artists) that is humorously entitled “The Ever-Popular Tortured Artist Effect” and it describes Cohen’s gunk perfectly IMHO.

What I make of it is, I’d rather listen to something else. Some people love him. When he died I was on a bus across Spain with a whole bunch of older Catholic ladies who all just had to sing “Hallelujah” out loud together in tribute. Having to listen to that was definitely penance.
 
Leonard Cohen had the utmost respect for religious traditions. He respected the compassion of Jesus, became a Buddhist monk, and, all the while, remained an Orthodox Jew. So I doubt he meant anything disrespectful.
 
I try not to read too much into your average artist’s lyrics. They’re not usually trained Catholic theologians proposing clear and beautiful theological truths.

Just because someone strings words together that have deep meaning in other contexts, doesn’t make the new formulation ‘deep’.

I actually enjoy Cohen’s ambiance. But I sort of treat his lyrics as dream imagery; you can overlay decent or interesting meaning onto it if you try hard, but you could probably also overlay some confused or messed up meanings, too.

(I’m not an in-depth enough Cohen analyst to know to what degree Cohen’s intended meanings, if known, are confused or clever, good or bad. I’d imagine as with many artists, there may be a mix of many things. And that’s pretty much as far as I think about it. May God rest his soul.)
 
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Leonard Cohen is one of my all-time favorite musical artists. Keep in mind that he grew up in Montreal years before Vatican II, one of the most Catholicism-drenched environments imaginable. He attended a Catholic school. It’s no wonder, then, that his music would reflect Catholic themes, mutated though they might be. I have never found anything patently disrespectful or blasphemous about his music, far from it. I stand in awe of the great gift.
 
I have ‘Everybody Knows’ running through my head now on repeat thanks to this thread. Haha.

Such heart-wrending lyrics from the beginning. You can immediately relate to what he’s expressing.
 
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I like the first verse relating the Calvary with Malibu, it seems to make a comment about the discrepancy between God’s sacrifice and the apparent comforts of today’s life, pointing a certain futility of the later. However the part referring to the Sacred Heart “blowing” seems kind of wrong, implying that It would be defeated.
 
I’d suggest the key thing to remember is that the words Cohen writes are that of a poet who isn’t Catholic.

So sometimes his lyrics may be reconcilable with a Catholic perspective on something (through coincidence or Cohen approaching a truth of conscience we can affirm), but other times they won’t be.

He’s aware about Catholic imagery so he talks about it, but he talks about imagery from other religions too, and he’s not putting himself forward as promoting any of these religions when he does so.

So as with any other media, know your own faith, and work to learn how to see whatever’s good in something, without being affected unduly by what’s bad in something. (Or learn to walk away from something if it truly just has a bad effect on you and you can’t parse out the good.)

(PS if this were a book club… I guess music club? 🙂 I guess I’d say I think your interpretation of the final verse seems reasonable to me. Both in the contrast between sacrifice and leisure, and in concluding that Cohen’s line paints a more pessimistic picture than a Catholic would.)
 
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I would highly recommend you look at Leonard Cohen beyond his music. Here is a description of his novel “Beautiful Losers”:

“ One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, Beautiful Losers is Leonard Cohen’ s most defiant and uninhibited work. As imagined by Cohen, hell is an apartment in Montreal, where a bereaved and lust-tormented narrator reconstructs his relations with the dead. In that hell two men and a woman twine impossibly and betray one another again and again. Memory blurs into blasphemous sexual fantasy–and redemption takes the form of an Iroquois saint and virgin who has been dead for 300 years but still has the power to save even the most degraded of her suitors.”

The Novel is blasphemous and sexually perverse involving the rape of Native American women. It particularly uses St. Kateri Tekakwitha! This is the kind of trash I had to read for my Canadian Lit class! 🤮

And no I don’t believe Leonard Cohen was Catholic, sorry.
 
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Fidem said:
However the part referring to the Sacred Heart “blowing” seems kind of wrong, implying that It would be defeated.
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I heard it as meaning “exploded” (“blowing up”) in compassion amid the contradictions of lost mankind.
 
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This thread is quite an eye-opener. Until this moment, I thought I was the only man on Earth who never cared for anything composed, written, or performed by Leonard Cohen.
 
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Ever since that priest sang “Hallelujah” at that wedding, it’s like you’re a heretic if you don’t like the song, despite its obvious… shortcomings… as a religious hymn.
 
Fidem said:
I like the first verse relating the Calvary with Malibu, it seems to make a comment about the discrepancy between God’s sacrifice and the apparent comforts of today’s life, pointing a certain futility of the later. However the part referring to the Sacred Heart “blowing” seems kind of wrong, implying that It would be defeated.
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As I alluded to above, his music is more “Catholic-flavored” than it is Catholic. He grew up in Montreal amidst a Catholicism that was all-pervasive and even had a Jansenistic streak, so I’m told. Even today you can cut the Catholic cultural patrimony in Quebec with a knife, it’s that “thick”. When Quebecois want to cuss, they use corruptions of liturgical and sacramental terms that cannot be repeated here.
 
HomeschoolDad said:
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Fidem:
I like the first verse relating the Calvary with Malibu, it seems to make a comment about the discrepancy between God’s sacrifice and the apparent comforts of today’s life, pointing a certain futility of the later. However the part referring to the Sacred Heart “blowing” seems kind of wrong, implying that It would be defeated.
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As I alluded to above, his music is more “Catholic-flavored” than it is Catholic. He grew up in Montreal amidst a Catholicism that was all-pervasive and even had a Jansenistic streak, so I’m told. Even today you can cut the Catholic cultural patrimony in Quebec with a knife, it’s that “thick”. When Quebecois want to cuss, they use corruptions of liturgical and sacramental terms that cannot be repeated here.
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Yup. Most of the younger folk don’t even know what the words mean, they simply learned them from infancy and might never have set foot in church since their Baptism.

In 2006 the Montreal Archdiocese commissioned an advertising campaign that erected large billboards in the city intended to shock and educate. Each billboard featured a word like “tabernacle” or “chalice” — startling swearwords on the street — and offered the correct dictionary definition for the religious term. Such as: “Tabernacle — small cupboard locked by key in the middle of the altar” containing the sacred goblet.

That didn’t change anything.
 
Phemie said:
Especially when you put back the verse that’s omitted form the version used in “Shrek”.
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Which was a really weird choice of a song to put in a children’s movie.

I did, however, like when they used it in Scrubs.
 
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