LISTEN: Revisiting Michael Cohen’s seminal & sad gay folk album 50 years after its release
Stonewall and Harvey Milk, not to mention the American Psychiatric Association had just declared that homosexuality was not a mental illness.
It’s no wonder folk singer Michael Cohen chose “The Last Angry Young Man” to open his 1973 debut album What Do You Expect?, billed as “songs sensitively and honestly dealing with the experiences of being gay.”The New York musician and cab driver (not to be confused with *ahem* the other Michael Cohen) is often overlooked as a queer music pioneer, but his unpolished candor and musings on love, loss, and identity gave a voice to a pre-Walkman generation of gays searching for connection on airwaves.
And there’s a reason why What Do You Expect? continues to strike a chord. If you don’t see it in Cohen’s stare from the cover, you’ll hear it in his Bob Dylan-esque vocals, somber piano chords, and guitar licks.Unlike his folksy contemporaries, Cohen bore the weight of being gay in the ’70s on his shoulders, a burden he begins to unload from the opening lyrics, a nod to teenage years in conversion therapy: “My mother said, the day I came out to her / She said, ‘You don’t want to be the last angry young man,’ / And I said ‘I don’t know, got so much inside of me that ain’t ever come out.’”Because of this, a palpable sense of melancholy underlies the seminal album’s entirety.
Still, the album’s crushing moments are amongst its most revolutionary. Nearly 50 years before “Sad Girl Autumn” would enter the indie lexicon, Cohen was gazing at fallen leaves on “Gone,” remembering a newly out-friend who died.
