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The Anti-Rock Star
Leonard Cohen’s battle against shameless male egoism
That his music sounds like nothing else in the universe is owed to the quiddity that is Leonard Cohen, no doubt, but also to an accident of timing: His career happened substantially apart from the dynamic of apotheosis and adulation that converts teenage boys with guitars into that salvific demigod, the rock star. In 1964, rock’s annus mirabilis, the year of Meet the Beatles and “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” Cohen won the Prix Littéraire du Québec for The Favourite Game, published his third volume of poetry, and sold his collected papers to the University of Toronto. He was ready to bear a special kind of witness.In the ’80s, the entertainment business was becoming a global multimedia oligopoly dominated by a tiny handful of publicly owned players, among them CBS Records, all in pursuit of Wall Street–pleasing superstars—artists who, ideally operating across all media, could act as reliable mega-earners.
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