Opinion: Reading the biographies of your artistic heroes can be a perilous pursuit. I can’t have been the only one who opened Sly Stone’s 2023 memoir Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) expecting to bathe in the spirit that gave birth to Stand! and Everyday People, but found myself staring into the darkness where a man’s soul had once been, before it was surrendered to crack cocaine.
In Sylvie Simmons’ I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, by contrast, the artist is never less than likeable. Where Stone treated women like meat, Cohen’s former lovers all seemed to adore him and his commitment to issues in perpetuity. But you may find yourself wishing that the charming, peripatetic poet would just get it together. By 1992, it appeared he had.
The Future, the album Cohen recorded that year, is purposeful and powerful. He’s out of his own head, finally, and into the culture. And although he largely sets aside the diminishing returns of biblical allegory, he has never sounded more like a prophet than on the title track of the record. “Give me back the Berlin Wall,” he snarls. “Give me Stalin and St Paul. I’ve seen the future, brother. It is murder.”
It was a disruptive vision at a time when the world was still aglow with the end of the Cold War and apartheid, in the year when a book called The End of History and the Last Man hailed the final victory of liberal democracy and freely trading nations.
But Cohen was living on the edge of South Central LA when it was engulfed by race riots in 1992. His then-fiancée, actor Rebecca De Mornay, told Simmons that Cohen felt compelled to be there amid the decline, while “the whole system is coming apart”, and that was what gave birth to The Future.
I happened to have reached that part of the book on November 6, the day before the anniversary of Cohen’s death and the day that news of the 2024 US presidential election results flowed out to the world. On that day, Elon Musk, the billionaire who helped fuel Donald Trump’s victory, posted a picture of himself in close discussion with the candidate on X, the social-media platform he bought to make into a symbol of darkness and decline. In a post bracketed with US flag emojis, he typed, “The future is gonna be so ...” followed by a “fire” emoji.
For many observers, of course, the fire might have been interpreted another way. The insanity of the victor’s economic policies, the cruelty promised to migrants and “errant” women, and the monstrous personal character of the victor and his associates seemed to amount to an arson attack on decency itself. A kind of riot.
It is understandable, necessary even, to just look away and let America get on with its bad dream. But Cohen, in his flush of riot-inspired prophecy, also offered a “wild little bouquet” in another song on the album: the vision that “democracy is coming to the USA”, from the darkness and chaos, “from the fires of the homeless, from the ashes of the gay” and “the wells of disappointment where the women kneel to pray”.
It’s the sentiment Antonio Gramsci had in 1929, when he wrote, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters” – another line quoted widely on November 6 – and things got pretty dicey after that. Is it simply a form of coping to perceive a light that can’t yet be seen?
In Anthem, a song he battled to get out, but which found its place on The Future, Leonard Cohen had a line for that, too:
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
