...

By Christopher Roberts

Global Publishing Editor

0

Share

Newsweek is a Trust Project member

See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.

Like father, like son. Tonight, at Meridian Hall in Toronto, Adam Cohen will take to the stage to sing Leonard Cohen’s songs, having modestly said, “I happen to have inherited his body type and his voice.” The show, Everybody Knows, recalls a song his father co-wrote in 1988 and it marks exactly ten years since his death.

The Canadian troubadour passed in his sleep at his home in Los Angeles on November 7, 2016, after a fall during the night. He was 82. The next day, Americans elected Donald Trump. The news of Cohen’s death was not made public until after the vote, so many of his fans (perhaps “fellow travelers” is a better phrase, however indelicate) took in the two events in the same week. Cohen never spoke publicly about Trump. He didn’t have the chance, but perhaps he never would have taken it anyway.

His final album, You Want It Darker, was released just three weeks before his death. That autumn he told The New Yorker, “I am ready to die. I hope it’s not too uncomfortable.” A few days later, at the Canadian consulate in Los Angeles, he took it back: “I’ve always been into self-dramatization. I intend to live forever.”

Read More on Analysis

Even when discussing his own mortality, that was typical of the man. He had spent decades declining to be pinned down—personally, sensually, religiously—and once said he had tried to “define a political position that no one can decipher.” What he left more indelibly were songs, some of them written 30 years before his death, about walls coming down, plagues arriving, and the base human hunger for extremes. Over the decade that began the morning after he died, the Trump era kept handing those songs back to his listeners and the America that emerged.

Cohen had a phrase not dissimilar to Trump’s inauguration lament about the “American nightmare” for the condition he thought the world was in. “The catastrophe has already happened,” he said, and the only question left was how to cope. His answer was idiosyncrasy. America’s answer, increasingly, appears to be certainty, not least among the cultural and political voices who’ve come to crowd out everyone else.

Songs do not remain fixed in the time in which they are written but wait for the world, and the people listening, to change around them. Sometimes they become more comforting, sometimes more troubling. Few of Cohen's songs have had to wait so long, ironically, as “The Future.”

...

The Future

“The Future,” the swirling, smouldering title song of Cohen’s 1992 album, was written amid the reckoning of the L.A. riots. For Cohen, those events foreshadowed a greater reckoning. The song seems to suggest a world in which morality had become exclusively relativistic, even to the extent of murder, and its narrator longs for the trifecta of the Berlin Wall, Stalin and St. Paul, because “things are going to slide, slide in all directions” as the “blizzard of the world” overwhelms everything, including the soul itself.

In 1992, there was no social media, no artificial intelligence, no content algorithms, not even the internet, or at last not as we would recognize today. If the blizzard of the world was overwhelming back then, it was a breeze compared to what followed.

But more pertinent still was the collapse of moral order, as Cohen saw it. And Trump, whatever his policy achievements or failures, saw that instinctively, from the other side. He saw it among his supporters too. Hence, months before Cohen’s death, he could say: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?”

Morality was applied differently depending on to whom it was applied, even to the extent of murder. But even on such matters, Cohen defied glib categorization. After his death, it was revealed he was a card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association, alongside his involvement with Buddhism.

There was, though, a particular moment behind Cohen's foreboding. The old certainties were already beginning to crumble. And, as “The Future” suggests, nowhere was that more visible than in the sudden disappearance of the most imposing physical symbol of the world he had grown up in.

The Walls

Cohen began writing “Democracy” in late 1989, as the Berlin Wall came down and the West celebrated. He later described himself as “that gloomy fellow who always turns up at a party to ruin the orgy.” He told the songwriter and journalist Paul Zollo that he expected “a lot of suffering will be the consequence of this wall coming down.” Not because he supported the Soviet Union, but because an age of superpower competition defined by mutually assured destruction gave a sense, illusory as it was, of moral stability. He wrote roughly 60 verses before he finished.

He asked himself where democracy was really arriving and settled on the United States, the place where races, classes, genders and sexual orientations meet. He called it “the real laboratory of democracy.”

Twenty-four years later, Trump ran for president on a promise to build a wall of his own, along the southern border, partly due to what he saw as a laboratory experiment out of control. Four years after that, on January 6, 2021, a crowd of his supporters rampaged through the walls of the Capitol to stop Congress from certifying his democratic defeat.

Cohen did not live to see Russian forces cross other walls into Ukraine. In 2022, Wayne Robins, who interviewed him when The Future came out, went back to the record and wrote that it had taken on new weight as war spread across Eastern Europe and American democratic norms came under strain.

But Cohen's anxiety wasn’t confined to the fate of political institutions or to borders being redrawn. He was really interested in what happened inside people when the walls fell away: the seductions of certainty and the peculiar glamour that extremism can acquire.

The Appetite

“First We Take Manhattan,” the opening track of 1988’s I’m Your Man, is sung by a man promising to seize control of two particularly pungent cultural petri dishes, Manhattan and Berlin. Backstage that year, Cohen was blunt: “It is a terrorist song.”

To Zollo he explained more. He said the most compelling energy of the age came from the extremes, and that he had to resist being drawn toward them in his own mind. The song, he said, was addressed to everyone who shares that fascination, and it was better to satisfy an appetite for extremism in a song than to blow up a bus full of schoolchildren. An extremist view identified in the song was to be guided by “the beauty of our weapons.”

In April 2017, five months after Cohen died, Trump ordered 59 Tomahawk missiles fired at a Syrian airbase. On MSNBC, as the launch footage played, Brian Williams said “I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen” before reciting the song’s line.

That June, Trump told the Emir of Qatar they would discuss buying “lots of beautiful military equipment.” In January 2020, threatening Iran, he promised to send some of America’s “brand new beautiful” equipment its way. That likely wasn’t the kind of beauty Cohen had in mind. There was undoubtedly something more there: a recollection of W. B. Yeats’ “terrible beauty,” not merely admiration or wonderment.

Violence was one expression of the disorder Cohen anticipated. But he was also interested in the quieter ways a society could come apart: the loss of trust, the spread of fear, and the sense that something was wrong even when nobody could quite say what it was.

...

The Plague

“Everybody Knows” describes a captain who lied and a plague moving fast. Cohen said “The plague in the most physical sense is AIDS.” He meant something wider too, describing “a plague of alienation and separation and lassitude and panic” beneath it.

The same song opens with loaded dice and a fight everybody knows was fixed. It’s difficult not to see the loaded dice as being a broadside against inequality. That’s something Trump also criticized, even as he lauded stock market gains whose benefits are concentrated among millionaires and billionaires. Yet Trump spent the months after the 2020 election insisting the dice had been loaded against him.

Cohen had been dead for more than three years when Covid-19 arrived. By March 2020, writers were noting that the song might as well have been written about it. Trump reached for the same word. In an April 2020 interview with Bob Woodward, recorded while he was pressing for the country to reopen, he said “It is the plague.” At rallies that year he told supporters there were many names for the virus: “I call it the plague from China. The plague.”

Cohen never seemed interested in telling his audience what to think and was suspicious of the idea that an artist should provide such answers. The generations that followed him have been rather less reticent. As American politics became increasingly difficult to separate from popular culture, musicians found themselves not merely commenting on the political moment but choosing sides in it.

The Endorsers

Cohen predicted the coming rejection of doubt, which mutated into the rejection of truth as “fake news.”

The artists who came after him have been less guarded. In the 2024 presidential race, Taylor Swift posted her hubristic endorsement of Kamala Harris minutes after the September debate, writing that Harris “fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior.” Bruce Springsteen backed Harris and said “Donald Trump is running to be an American tyrant.” Beyoncé let Harris use “Freedom” in her first campaign ad.

Trump drew his musicians largely from country and rap. Kid Rock performed before Trump’s acceptance speech at the 2024 Republican convention, and Lee Greenwood introduced him on two nights. Kid Rock put his reasons simply: “I want that guy on my team.” Kid Rock, Jason Aldean, Greenwood and Billy Ray Cyrus all appeared at inauguration events in January 2025, as did the tenor Christopher Macchio, who sang the national anthem. Macchio had sung Cohen’s song “Hallelujah” at the 2020 Republican convention.

Cohen's music has always belonged, liked any music, partly to the people who listen to it. But that doesn't mean every use of it is an act of understanding.

The Borrowed Hymn

“Hallelujah” was the song in which the orbits of Trump and Cohen did collide. The Republican National Convention played it twice in 2020 even after Cohen’s estate had refused permission. The estate’s lawyer, Michelle Rice, replied that if the party had asked for “You Want It Darker” instead, “we might have considered approval of that song.”

In October 2024 the estate had Sony send the Trump campaign a cease-and-desist letter, and Rufus Wainwright said he was mortified that his own cover had been played at a campaign event. In June this year, ahead of a rally in Washington marking the country’s 250th birthday, Cohen’s estate issued a statement: “This use is not authorized, and the Estate does not support or approve” it. The song was performed anyway, as a beautiful B-2 bomber flew overhead.

Hallelujah for the war with Iran was not what Cohen had in mind, though we can’t be sure. After all, he did once perform for Israeli soldiers in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and returned a changed and reinvigorated man.

Yet it would be a mistake to leave Cohen in the company of those who foresaw catastrophe and had nothing to offer beyond the warning. Darkness was never everything.

...

The Crack

Cohen had an answer for despair too, and it came on the same album as “The Future.” Of “Anthem,” he said, “The future is no excuse for an abdication of your own personal responsibilities.” In the week he died, its lines about the crack that lets the light in spread across the internet.

In 2014, when a reporter suggested his new songs carried a hidden hope amid the darkness, he answered, “I’m a closet optimist.”

There’s much to be said for optimism. There’s also much to be said for doubt. The confusion of America in the Trump era was that so many people thought the latter must negate the former.

Ten years after his death, we are still trying to make sense of the future Cohen described. Perhaps that is why his songs endure: not because they tell us what is going to happen, but because they remind us that we might not know. In an age of extremes, everybody thinks they know. They can't all be right, all the time.

View 0 Comments

Request Reprint & Licensing

Submit Correction

View Editorial & AI Guidelines