Leonard Cohen: Discard the slogans

Musician and songwriter Leonard Cohen:

In writing, if you can discard the slogans that naturally come to you, especially in a highly politicized time like we are now, where gender politics and regular politics and environmental politics, where there’s a good thing to say about everything if you’re on the right side, these times are very difficult to write in because the slogans really are jamming the airwaves…

It’s something that goes beyond what has been called political correctness. It’s a kind of tyranny of a posture, a kind of tyranny that exists today of what the right thing should be.

So those ideas are swarming through the air like locusts. And it’s difficult for the writer to determine what he really thinks about things, what he really feels about things.

So in my own case, I have to write the verse and then see if it’s a slogan or not and then toss it. But I can’t toss it until I’ve worked on it and seen what it really is. So I find that process of writing the verse and discarding it until I get down to something that doesn’t sound like a slogan, that doesn’t sound like something that’s easy, that surprises me.

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