Mentioned my love of Leonard Cohen just yesterday, and now he’s sadly gone. In 1966, he said, “I think history and time pretty much build obsolescence into poetry unless it’s really, really the great stuff.” His was.
Would there have been the same backlash if Cohen, rather than Bob Dylan, had won the Nobel Prize for Literature? I don’t know. As monumental as Cohen was as a songwriter, he retained an outsider status, a mystique, that might have made him more acceptable to those who cried the award should have instead gone to Margaret Atwood or Philip Roth (who, of course, are both very deserving, as is Dylan). He also wrote poetry and novels, so perhaps that would have made him more palatable, though it was clearly his lyrics that would have earned him the honor if it had happened.
Cohen, who was never sanguine about the present, spoke fearfully and prophetically, in 1992, about the future, tapping into a violence, an invasion, that he thought was fast approaching. He believed there would be a seismic shift, that privacy would become a thing of the past, and he was right. He didn’t, however, foresee that the centralization of media power–what he had decried earlier in “Tower of Song” as “the rich having their channels in the bedrooms of the poor”–would be overturned by new technology. The channels grew exponentially and were now in our hands. We’ve thus far clearly fumbled them, or is there just no way they can be handled?
THE FUTURE
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!
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.
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
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
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
Things are going to slide …
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
You’ll see a woman
hanging upside down
her features covered by her fallen gown
and all the lousy little poets
coming round
tryin’ to sound like Charlie Manson
and the white man dancin’
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
Things are going to slide …
When they said REPENT REPENT …