If you were to trace the line of lyrical influence, among all the great musicians of the modern day, you would swiftly learn that all roads lead back to Leonard Cohen.
There are, of course, many musical greats who transcend the idea of putting pen to paper, and paper to instrument, but few, if any, did it finer than Cohen. Largely because there was a long period of his career when the instrument wasn’t even involved in proceedings. Rambling through the streets of New York and its vibrant Greenwich Village scene, Cohen simply made his name as a poet and so mastered the art of poetic performance, without any musical aid.
A reductive take for someone who operates on the sort of intelligence level Cohen did, but an important distinction to make for any of the uninitiated. This is no singer-songwriter who pens lyrics down as a brief afterthought; no, this is an artist led by the words that exist in the very depths of his soul that can draw them out in a multitude of ways, music just being one of them.
When he decided to delve further into the world of singer-songwriter, his creativity was approached with a similar level of nuance. “When people talk about Leonard,” Bob Dylan once said, “They fail to mention his melodies, which to me, along with his lyrics, are his greatest genius. Even the counterpoint lines, they give a celestial character and melodic lift to every one of his songs.”
In an era already filled with some of the greats of our time, Cohen cut through the scene like a hot knife through butter, becoming the sharp lyrical force others had dreamed of being. The cultural and theological references we thought Dylan had mastered seemed to be just the beginning in Cohen’s work, as one reference would give way to another, and before you knew it, you were willingly trapped in the depths of his metaphoric maze.
And so, as the 1960s rolled on, the praise of his intellectual counterparts kept coming. Joni Mitchell once claimed that “‘Suzanne’ was one of the greatest songs I ever heard,” adding, “He made me feel humble because I looked at that song, and I went, ‘Woah. All my songs seem so naive by comparison.’ It raised the standard of what I wanted to write.”
When it comes to choosing your favourite Cohen line, we were simply spoiled for choice. But for Lou Reed, who was in the business of creating art that shocked and innovated at the same time, it was Cohen’s more crass take that caught his eye.
He claimed, “You know, Leonard Cohen had one of the greatest opening lines ever in one of his songs: ‘Give me crack and anal sex’.”
On paper, you could recoil or even laugh at both Reed’s statement and the fact that Cohen once wrote that. But in many ways, it’s there that his genius lies. It was a brazen litmus test for Cohen to determine music fans willing to separate the wheat from the chaff and truly dig into the broader picture of his lyrical offerings.
The song from which that line is taken, ‘The Future’, provides the listener with a vision of the apocalypse, shared with images both sacred and profane, to ultimately ask us uncomfortable and honest existential questions. He was the voice of modern humanity, and on songs like ‘The Future’ proved he was willing to show the very depths of that.
