First we take Manhattan

[ewx]

[Poll #472298]

It's a curious song and the other day we were wondering what it meant. A bit of googling reveals Cohen being at best playfuly evasive on the subject, but he only wrote it, so what would he know anyway?

Me, I think it's an artist, who knows they are just about to really arrive, their first big shows being in the two cities named. They perceive themselves as an outsider, or have a vernacular, populist style (the line of people in the station being ‘the common man’). It's perhaps addressed in part to someone close to them, who has so far been much more succesful, but is about to be eclipsed.

There are definite hints of the Jewish experience of World War 2 though: the birthmark on the skin could be a camp tattoo, the line in the station refer to the death trains, Manhattan to Einstein's role in supporting the development of nuclear weapons, Berlin to the defeat of the Nazis. The monkey and the violin don't seem to make much sense in this interpretation though.