Free Download: https://archive.org/details/leonard-cohen-everybody-knows-trish-the-weatherwoman-remix
Way back when I was a freshly-minted baby queer in the mid 2010s in the outcast haven and vice den of Berlin, I got to listening to Leonard Cohen on a small metal boom box that I connected to my mp3 player with an auxiliary cable. One song shook me, really shook me – “Everybody Knows”, from his 1988 album I’m Your Man. For me the track perfectly summarised that moment; somehow like the small–infinitesimally small–pause between inhaling and exhaling or the cartoonish moment of free-fall where a character runs off a cliff and is floating for the moments until they look down.
Something felt off in the world, namely the collapse yet zombie-like return of the neoliberal project in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis, which was essentially the Great Housing Swindle in which billions or even trillions of dollars of value (which is, as Marx reminds us, the blood and sweat of actual workers) was extracted from the economy, yet there were no consequences who did the thieving. In fact, the kinds of people and institutions who ran the racket or turned a blind eye were handed more money to keep the grift afloat a little bit longer, the greasy wave that we are still riding now but which seems to have gasped its final foamy gasp on the shores of the Strait of Hormuz.
I had this feeling, and I have it still, that the world I live in is built on lies, corruption and bad conscience, and Leonard Cohen’s refrain, “Everybody Knows” spoke and speaks the fatalism that creeps in as war and genocide is normalised and denied, rich rapists run free, while the poor toil, isolated from one another in their white vans and zero hour contracts, a miasma of mutual loathing that keeps the powerful from ever having to face any consequences.
At the time I made a rough remix influenced by the Italo-Disco revival with a little Justice-flavoured break in the middle, and I circulated my take on Leonard Cohen among friends and a music blog. The other month, old pal MC Gaff-E asked me for a copy. So I searched my hard drives and unearthed my efforts. It was never properly mixed or mastered, so I made a few tweaks this evening so that I could unleash it on the world again.
Then I went out to Tempelhofer Feld and sat on the perimeter of a Capoeira circle and had to lie down and stare at the sky. And the music felt good. And the sense of community felt good. And I remembered that there are other dimensions to human experience in 2026 besides the downward spiral of which Cohen sings, in his cynical, gravel-laden voice. But this song still hits.
