“The Future might as easily have been a book: A more troubling, more vexing image of human failure has not been written.”
– Christian Wright (Rolling Stone)
The Future by Leonard Cohen is about as bleak as it gets. And that’s saying a lot for an artist whose final studio album was You Want it Darker (2016). It is certainly one of the songs that has earned Leonard Cohen his reputation for being pessimistic, a prophet of doom. It’s definitely a label I’m well acquainted with, but I prefer ‘romantic pessimist’ which I’m sure he would. The song also featured in the film Natural Born Killers which is certainly not an optimistic look on the world (Quentin Tarantino was a co-writer).
Cohen released The Future at the tail end of the Cold War and the beginning of what would be a new dawn of liberal democracy. But, he predicted the hangover. And a big one at that. “Things are going to slide in all directions / Won’t be nothing you can measure anymore.” What’s chilling is how this feels more akin to what’s happening in the current age than from 1992 especially as far as Post Modernism and Dialectics are concerned – ie banging the thesis and antithesis together and creating a new pseudo reality. But alas there seems to be a tiny door for hope and love in the midst of The Future where Cohen sings:
I’ve seen the nations rise and fall
I’ve heard their stories, heard them all
But love’s the only engine of survival
Leonard said about the Future in in a 1993 Boston Globe interview (see reference at bottom of this post):
“What I find in writing is that at the beginning of the process you try to support your opinions — about the environment, about politics, about where you stand — and I find that even though that may make you a good citizen, it makes for a very bad songwriter. You may get positions you can applaud, but they’re boring, they’re alibis. If you think by saving the forest, you’re going to redeem your soul, you’ve got another thing coming. There’s something else at stake…”
Later Cohen said, “‘The Future’ is dark and funny. If I’d have nailed that to the church door like Martin Luther it’d be a very sinister document. But it’s married to a hot little dance track so, in a sense, the words melt into the music and the music melts into the words and you’re left with a kind of refreshment, a kind of oxygen.”
Two years after this record, Cohen retreated from the world – quite literally. In 1994, he entered the Mount Baldy Zen Center in Los Angeles, where he would spend five years in near-complete solitude. There, he was ordained as a Buddhist monk and given the monastic name Jikan, the “Silent One“.
[Verse 1]
Give me back my broken night, my mirrored room, my secret life
It’s lonely here, there’s no one left to torture
Give me absolute control over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby, that’s an order!
[Verse 2]
Give me crack and anal sex, take the only tree that’s left
And stuff it up the hole in your culture
Give me back the Berlin Wall, give me Stalin and St. Paul
I’ve seen the future, brother, it is murder
[Chorus: Leonard Cohen, Choir, Leonard Cohen & Choir]
Things are going to slide (slide) in all directions
Won’t be nothing (won’t be nothing), nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold
And it’s overturned the order of the soul
When they said (they said) repent (repent), repent (repent)
I wonder what they meant
When they said (they said) repent (repent), repent (repent)
I wonder what they meant
When they said (they said) repent (repent), repent (repent)
I wonder what they meant
[Verse 3]
You don’t know me from the wind, you never will, you never did
I’m the little Jew who wrote the Bible
I’ve seen the nations rise and fall, I’ve heard their stories, heard them all
But love’s the only engine of survival
[Verse 4]
Your servant here, he has been told to say it clear, to say it cold
It’s over, it ain’t going any further
And now the wheels of Heaven stop, you feel the devil’s riding crop
Get ready for the future: It is murder
[Chorus: Leonard Cohen, Choir, Leonard Cohen & Choir]
[Verse 5]
There’ll be the breaking of the ancient Western code
Your private life will suddenly explode
There’ll be phantoms, there’ll be fires on the road
And the white man dancing
[Verse 6]
You’ll see your woman hanging upside down
Her features covered by her fallen gown
And all the lousy little poets coming round
Trying to sound like Charlie Manson
Yeah, the white man dancing
[Verse 7]
Give me back the Berlin Wall, give me Stalin and St. Paul
Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima
Destroy another fetus now, we don’t like children anyhow
I’ve seen the future, baby: It is murder
[Chorus: Leonard Cohen, Choir, Leonard Cohen & Choir]
From the Wikipedia reference below:
The Future made the Top 40 in the UK album charts, went double platinum in Canada, and sold a quarter of a million copies in the U.S., which had previously been unenthusiastic about Cohen’s albums…Cohen also won the Canadian Juno Award for Best Male Vocalist in 1993 for The Future. In his acceptance speech, he quipped, “Only in Canada could somebody with a voice like mine win Vocalist of the Year.”
References:
1. The Future (Leonard Cohen album) – Leonard Cohen
2. The ‘dark and funny’ song that Leonard Cohen would have nailed to a church door – Forward
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