Play that funky music, Jewish boy

Leonard Cohen sings, or rather recites, his sexual past as if he were an art historian talking about his favorite painters of the baroque. Cohen does not sing, or he sings in a near-monotone, a murmur so slow that it is profane, as if to actively communicate the fact that he is a novelist and a poet, a failed novelist turned musician. He deflates a traditional mode of the love song with a kind of dismissive spiritual detachedness, the detachedness of a Buddhist, a Jewish Buddhist, or, as my aunt says, a 'Jew-Bu' (he is one of the few musicians to devote his life entirely to Buddhism at one point).

Whereas the white Africanist male singer would croon for the woman, his words the evidence of the irrational sacrifices he makes for the object of his desires, the Jewish balladeer, epitomized by Cohen and Bob Dylan, approaches the situation differently. Jews are still not white, try as we might, or, as Hannah Arendt put it, 'there is no escaping Jewishness' (and Jewishness is not, Judith Butler points out, the same as Judaism). Both Cohen and Dylan have not tried to escape their Jewishness, and this has been part of the key to their enormous success. There is a poetic moment to their sonic fictions, a theoretical aspect to their sonorous mobility, which can be traced back to the exegetical and the Talmud.

This is not to say that a Jew, someone like Neil Diamond, perhaps, is incapable of writing, and presenting him or herself, in a thoroughly non-Jewish mode, or that a non-Jew is incapable of displaying an intense Jewish influence. The description of an aesthetic, or, as Susan Sontag would say, of a sensibility, must allow for an articulation of the ways in which the sensibility, the movement, has moved, itself, through cultures, rubbing against others.