Music For Broken People

This mix probably should speak for itself, but when I have I ever let something like that stop me from sticking my two cents in?

We start off with the Canadian Music Icon of my university days, Mr. Jerry “Jerry Jerry” Woods, and his orchestra. He’s giving some helpful advice from one broken person to another, but doing it painfully in a “tough love” way–imagine Henry Chinaski sliding off his barstool while dropping some reality on a barmate, except if he could form it into a perfect four minute piece with nice rock orchestration. In the liner notes, Jerry says “I once suffered a hand injury while repairing Leonard Cohen’s window. Although that’s not what this song is about, we’ll send it out to him anyway.”

Which, of course, leads us to another Montreal musician, the Man Himself. And here we have him looking out on the million unseen wrongs that our nominal “land of plenty” is built on, and losing his hope. I think there’s a valid, if depressingThis is Leonard Cohen, people., reading of the lyrics as the character being drawn to pray, even as he’s arguing with God that he knows that the praying is meaningless in this broken and unsaved world. For me, it’s a lovely sounding examination of hollow ritual.

Well, that’s one reaction to a broken world, but falling into hollow ritual is probably not as useful a reaction as keeping some hope alive–that’s what fuels efforts to improve the situation after all. So we’ll follow up with a song about maintaining hope for a better world, in spite of the way the world tries to break you. It’s a Doc Pomus tuneRecall, Doc famously said he wrote for “…those people stumbling around in the night out there, uncertain or not always so certain of exactly where they fit in and where they were headed.”, in this case recorded by Irma Thomas, although there are lots of other famous versions.

Of course, it’s not always about how you see the world, sometimes it’s about how you see you, and what the world has done to you. Or maybe about that person who helps you see you with new eyes–maybe the best thing that could happen to a broken person. Well, Doc’s got a tune about that as well, recorded here by Johnny Adams, and it’s a beautiful one. This is certainly the finest piece of music I ever found out about by way of a sitcom.

And now, since things are looking up for our broken people, a final message from Ms. Ani–that sometimes the world will break you if you have no yield in you, and that sometimes the right thing to do is bend a little bit. But you know, even if something does break, that’s OK, because–as Ani says in one of the many brilliant bits strewn throughout her lyrics–we’re made to deal with that:

we are made to bleed
and scab and heal and bleed again
and turn every scar into a joke
we are made to fight
and fuck and talk and fight again
and sit around and laugh until we choke

And maybe that’s the both the best revenge on the world that broke us, and the way to know that we’re healed: when we can turn a scar into a joke, and laugh madly about it.