'Everybody Knows' what everybody knows

By gaiJEN, stranger in a strange land

ife’s not fair. Everybody knows this. As a phrase it is repeated ad nauseam by frustrated parents to snot-nosed kids mid tantrum. As a concept, it is demonstrated during bombings, hurricanes, economic meltdowns, poverty, war, and reality television. As a song, it is expressed fully in the verses of Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows”.

I first heard this song in the early ‘90s when Concrete Blonde did a cover for the Pump Up the Volume soundtrack. It was an in-between time for me; I was on the cusp of adolescence, verging on the brink of discovering that particular rage that grips every teenager at some point. High school was looming on the horizon like a force of nature and while we were learning the survival drills, practicing the duck-and-covers, learning to obey the disembodied voices authoritative over the school public announcement system, I didn’t have a full appreciation for the true wreckage that high school would reveal once the rains stopped and the floods receded. Middle school was its own particular hell/heaven and I couldn’t begin to prepare for anything other than the petty crises and shallow emergencies that colored my small sheltered life in those immediate moments.

Leonard Cohen’s song was like an oracle chanting the future. Everything was about to become very ‘NOT FAIR’, I just didn’t know it yet. A friend of mine had the soundtrack to Pump Up the Volume. She was much worldlier than I was. She was poised when I was spastic, graceful where I was clumsy, intelligent when I was loud, fine boned when I was solidly constructed, beautiful when I was not. Her father was a photographer and mine was Army. Her house had soaring open ceilings and mine had dark wood paneling on the walls. She had a hot tub in her backyard. I had a burnt patch of grass where the sun bore down during the hot Texas summers. She was everything that I wished to be and she liked this song. We would listen to it over and over again. I made a copy of the soundtrack. I memorized the lyrics. I pretended that I understood what it all meant. I would spend the next several years of my life confused, pretending that I understood.

Leonard Cohen wrote “Everybody Knows” in 1988 (Album: I’m Your Man). Thematically, the song is about social inequality (“…the poor stay poor/ and the rich get rich”) racism (“Old black joes still pickin’ cotton”), infidelity:

“Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you’ve been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you’ve been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows”

And ultimately, complacency:

“Everybody knows, everybody knows
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows”

Several artists have covered ‘Everybody Knows’: K.D. Lang, Don Henley, Rufus Wainwright, and various international recording artists. I like the Concrete Blonde version the best, followed by the original. There is something confessional about Leonard Cohen’s monotone. His cadence is hypnotic and soothing. His base baritone resonates in the deep dark places inside us, calling us forth into a spill of cool blue light. ‘Everybody Knows’ is not my favorite Cohen song, but it was my first and the chord it struck in me then continues to thrum and hum and sigh and whisper and fade and swell again and again and again.