This audio article was published by The Sociable Truth on April 27th 2004. This article has 30 comments.
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a lovely sweetly of roman and tears for my ears. it lilts and croons and i love it.
oH HOW ILOVE IT.
ITS sicky and fucks leonard deeeply in his tibetan canadian tube.
what a delightful chap you are.
Bitches and queers? Is that how you see people? I pray for your soul.
Thank you for you prayers Gooseflesh, I need them
I came so far for beauty, but things become much more sordid with age
Leonard, you are a sordid man. I miss you.
So long
Leonard, who was that slut in the Chelsea Hotel? She touched your perfect body with her hands.
Has anyone seen my green stockings? I think Leonard borrowed them for something.
What’s with all the ladies? Gooseflesh, what’s today’s beef?
As a ‘queer’ I’m bored of people going on about it, I wish they could just fuck off to the shops and leave it alone. The Sociable Truth, I like the song aside from that.
That goose flesh is a slippery customer
He wore KY jelly
I wore vasaline
That’s nice Joan, I’m sure the goose will sink beneath your wisdom like a stone.
I’ll think of next time I’m scooping the lube
Is this vindicitive? I was only trying to air my ideas.
sorry goose
I didn’t see your post before
not being vindictive, merely trying to cram as many leonard cohen lyrics into each post
I don’t like the terms bitches and queers and would certainly never use them toward anybody.
It is with a sniff of irony such words are sung as comment on Cohen’s use of words in songs such as ‘one of us cannot be wrong’
Has anybody heard my latest album “Ten new songs?”
Ahem!
As co-scribe of this song (by the way Mr Sociable, you can expect a Smiths-esque law suit, garbed by myself in the guise of an iguana to come knocking on your glassy framed eyeballs when you, ironically, least expect it, in regards to my not being credited in these regards) I feel that I should respond to the consternation generated by the ‘bitches and queers’ line that came from mine own, admitedly ocassionaly prejudiced, drink addled mind.
So…
No statement is made in relation to any approval or disapproval of said “bitches and queers” and the narrator is, rather, simply musing on them; among other such emitionally nondescirpt things as mayonaise and strong lagered beers.
You don’t hear Andrew Stanton of the Strong Lagered Beers Society bitching like a poof about having his beloved brews mused upon. Do you?
And Leonard Cohen doesn’t care that we’re stealing his ‘theme’ - he just gets on with things and promotes his latest album.
And most certainly above all else this is not a gay or feminist issue. Such issues interest me not and so I choose not to write about them.
The word ‘queer’ before it was hijacked by moonshine swillin’ homophobic bigots and then hijacked again by ‘gay and proud’ t-shirt wearin’ isolationists was used as a description of someone who was a bit strange… therefore (and I hope my girlfriend and moonshine swillin’ homophobic bigot friends don’t hear anything about this, but here goes…) I too am queer.
As for bitches - well, those that knows me knows I am a bitch, otherwise I wouldn’t go around co-writing songs that effect over sensitive roman faggots.
In conclusion, it seems unreasonable to silence my use of the words queer, bitch and mayonaise as I have proved that I am, in fact, all of the above and am simply wearing a “queer, bitch, mayonaise and proud” t-shirt in the only way I know how… through someone elses singing voice.
I would like to finish this essay with a quote “Charles Manson stole this from the Beatles and Bono stole it from him, then the woman playing the U2 song at The Metro Club, Sidcup, stole it from Bono and gave it to me, I accidentally put it over there and someone said ‘no fuck off, you can’t do that’ and that, to me at least, seems unreasonable - so I’m stealing it back!”
Love and Peace
Jamie.
jamie - I don’t know if I agree with the gist of your jab …
The words ‘bitches and queers’ *do* stick out in this song. They are emotive, and are qualitatively different to something neutral like ’strong lager beers’.
If we’re being literary about it, the words are also marked out by plosive sounds that make it stick out from the smooth ’seers and sayers’. The overall effect is a bit shocking. That’s not neccessarily a bad thing: it’s where the song derives a lot of its impact, through alarming contrasts in sound and substance.
There are all sorts of valid reasons for using offensive terminology in ‘the wreckage of poetry music and art’. But what you can’t do is pretend that what you’re doing is ‘neutral’ or ‘emitionally nondescirpt’. Words are hardly ever neutral, whether you’re writing a press release about ‘terrorists’ operating in Iraq or reclaiming the word ‘nigger’ for the ghetto.
There is casual homophobia from the media, because people think it doesn’t matter. It’s not a deliberate smear campaign by bigots. It’s journos and writers looking for material. Channel 4 did a program about cottaging, and called it’The Reality of Gay Sex’. Not ‘A Reality of Gay Sex’, not ‘Cottaging’, but ‘The Reality of Gay Sex’. It’s very easy to reinforce existing prejudices.
Unfortunately, there is still a ’snigger factor’ associated with the word ‘queer’. I like this song: but I find the line about ‘bitches and queers’ provocative. You need to be able to justify your use of it, not just say “it doesn’t matter”.
(I’ve spent a *long* time watching from my lonely wooden tower …)
Hmm - this kind of links to the current debate surrounding Complete Control. It’s an issue of semantics - which is, as I admitedly have fallen trap to both in this debate and within the song - a term and a notion often used to manipulate in the first place and squirm out of tricky spots once you’ve been caught being manipulative.
So (as a hopefully refreshing spurt of fresh air) I’ll be straight… sorry, no pun intended… but accidentally enjoyed, nonetheless.
The satirising of people who use offensive or derogative language is, I believe, most effective when it goes unexplained. The terms queer and bitch are (to me) funny, because they’re really quite silly sounding words yet they are used with such emotional surety by people to describe their completely unjustified hatred of others.
In the pub where I work (Sidcup, remember) it would not seem vaguely out of place to hear the words ‘bitch, queer, mayonaise and beer’ all in one drunken murmered sentence from across the bar - and these people are being serious. In fact I’ve been called a poof (presumably because of my lean figure and girly hair) by at least one scared butch local prick too insecure to mouth it any louder than under his breath - and then, moments later, been referred to, by said primate, as ‘mate’ while he places his order for more booze.
This is, of course, sad - and it is probably this Sidcup pub corner of consciousness that spawned the line in the song that (as I never expected would happen) has managed to offend, stick out, stir debate, etcetera.
I hope this clears up the sense and purpose of the line in the first place as well as the subsequent email which was (in case you didn’t notice) absolutely littered with offensive anti-ness… which I now accept was perhaps not the best way to go about responding.
Anyway… I didn’t really write any of the song. It was all Arran who I know for a fact is a prejudiced, homophobic, curly haired, lager swilling, mayonaise snorting, non-co-writers-crediting, glassy eyed poof!
Sorry again for any harm.
Love and peace (yeah, one day),
Jamie.
Well I’m glad that’s all cleared up
all that’s left is to wait for the miracle to come
goodnight
Arran is dangerous
stoning to death IS the only option
Holy moley, not another battle of semantics! Torture, abuse, bitches, queers … alittlepoison has turned into a bloody word war. Admittedly I started the last one, by casually dropping the word ‘torture’ into one of my comments, but I think we’re in danger of tying ourselves into knots for no apparent good reason. I happen to see this song (which I love to pieces) as a dreamy postmodern meander in and out of sense and meaning, a song which plays with words and has no concrete logic to hold it down to any particular definition. The bitches and queers line has no more relevance or irrelevance than any other - and yes, before anyone jumps down my throat over this, I know these words are loaded and can be taken offensively, but I would argue it is up to us to have the imagination and intelligence to look past this obvious PC gut jerk reaction and actually listen to the words as they appear in the spirit of the song - in my opinion these words, in this context, are as sweet and beautiful as anything else in the song. Is this really so hard to imagine?
“The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, ‘Is there a
meaning to music?’ My answer would be, ‘Yes.’ And ‘Can you state in so
many words what the meaning is?” My answer to that would be, ‘No.’”
- Aaron Copland
“Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking.”
- Maynard Keynes
“A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.”
- Melville
“When ideas fail, words come in very handy.”
- Goethe
“quotations are the last bastion of the scoundrel”- Samuel Pepys
“Samuel Pepys was a bastard and his mother dishonest” - Christopher Marlowe
Is that the Christopher Marlowe who died 40 years before Pepys was born?
Yeah, man… it’s me!
In all my eternal glory, baby.
And anyway, Bertrand, didn’t you once claim
that: “the trouble with the world is that the stupid are really full of beans and the the intelligent are all locked in a shed in Lime Regis” ?
Damn straight.
I went to Lyme Regis and stayed in a tent in John Fowles’ garden. He’s a writer y’know.
i’d really appreciate it if someone can tell me what the lyrics mean. i have listened to it but A. i’m really tired and i can’t reallly thinnk and 2. i i i just can’t work itt out. like it though.