How do you all think Leonard Cohen’s music is best classified? I think his career can be broken up into three periods.
His 60s and 70s music would fall under folk music, but what about his subsequent albums and his one stray album (Death of a Ladies’ Man)? I see two later periods. I think his 80s and 90s albums (Various Positions, I’m Your Man, The Future) are all the same genre. Similarly everything since 2000 starting with Dear Heather seems to be another different genre. I like the music from all three of the stages in his career, but I’m just not sure how to classify his later two stages. As for Death of a Ladies’ Man, that one seems even more bizarre and difficult to classify since it doesn’t seem to really fit in with any of the other groupings. Should I even divide his career up into these three stages?
I think every career can be divided into stages. It seems to me to be three because people are primed to look for three, but who cares, why not, if it makes sense to you. (Even when someone dies in a freak accident, someone retrospectively seems to come up with three stages, even though if the three-stage concept were true then that career should end in the middle of stage 2.)
In Spain he’s called a poeta urbano… city poet. Dylan and our Joaquín Sabina get the same classification. Their individual songs may fall into different slots (Sabina even wrote at least one ranchera), but the kind of subject matter is consistent throughout. In their case, the classification is based more on the lyrics than the music. The same happens with some other genres such as canciones de la morriña (homesickness songs), which can come with all kindsofmusic.
Eh, like everything it depends on whether you’re a splitter or joiner. Urban pop? Maybe.
Pop music gets a bad rap, but a lot of music falls under the genre. Bing Crosby, Irving Berlin, Britney Spears. All pop. Ditto a lot of other popular music.
Not only that, it also depends how special in your own mind a certain artist is. Your personal favourites get three categories all to themselves, while the ones you’re not that interested in are all the same.
It’s relatively easy to demonstrate that his songs aren’t blues. You could just as easily say they have to be country songs because he was from Canada and Canada is a country.
I get your point, but western Canada actually has a pretty strong tradition of country music (in the regular sense of the name). A number of Grand Ole Opry members hail from Canada.
Blues music has particular structures , melodic elements (the blues scale, blue notes like the flat 3, flat 5, flat 7), harmonies (based predominantly on I7, IV7, V7), and song forms. Very little of Cohen’s music has anything to do with the idiom. I mean, there’s “Almost Like The Blues” which at least follows the song structure and chord progression of a 12-bar minor blues tune, although transformed through Cohen.
When I face this conundrum I assign the artist’s name as the genre, and did so with Cohen. Frank Zappa certainly required this treatment. It’s a sign of respect as well as a solution to the problem. For example, even though the Beatles could arguably be called Rock artists, I label all their output—even their solo work—Beatles. For some artists, lumping them in with all other artists of a common genre just wouldn’t be right even if it might be fitting. It does mean that one needs a catchall definition if one wants to listen to, say, Zappa and the Beatles along with all other rock acts, but that’s what playlists are for.
