Why do I give valuable time to people who don't care if I live or die? (The Smiths)

I've never got Leonard Cohen.

I've said before that hating a piece of music is stoopid but, by Jiminy, there are some groups/singers that get me jolly close to that point.
Obviously this is entering very subjective territory.

Category 1 - singer offends my ears:  Zager and Evans' In the Year 2525; Bjork (everything), Portishead (everything); Geddy Lee from Rush; Opera (everything); the bloke from Pavlov's Dog; Leonard Cohen.

Category 2 - the song's boring: Zager and Evans' In the Year 2525; George Bakers' Little Green Bag; all techno/trance club drone music with a mechanical durff durff beat; Leonard Cohen (yep - all of it).

Category 3 - the subject matter is offensive: a lot of Heavy/Hard Rock posturing can be quite cringe inducing and that goes for a lot of Rap as well; all of the Satan worshipping sub-genre of Metal turns me right off; any misogynist song (Jagger? Guilty as charged, and a lot of rap bilge); self aggrandisements (my name is Prince? Yawn).

Category 4 - sheer unrelentingly depressing music: Leonard Cohen.

I don't mind getting into a melancholy state of mind from time to time but I draw the line at infinite sadness. And that seems to sum up Leonard's oeuvre.

Various friends and colleagues have tried to get me to enter Cohenville over the years and I did watch a lot of the Live In London DVD from a few years back (Lenny in tie 'n' fedora down t'O2 Arena) but I got bored after a few songs and needed a dose of Rammstein to cleanse the palette.

He's a weird one really - a Canadian misery guts poet who fell into being a song and dance man.

Even his poetry fails to move me.

In Suzanne, frinstance, we have the enigmatic refrain - you've touched her perfect body with your mind. What the hell does that mean? And then Jesus appears in the song! Whaaaat?????

There's nothing in there for me to grab onto and so I drift off. Have a go...



Yeah I know - he's world famous, he's sold heaps of records, he gets the ladies, he's on the cover of Mojo... but (picture me shaking my head from side to side with a quizzical expression) I just don't get it.