TheFuture
Leonard Cohen
The Future
A prophet of doom serenades the apocalypse in C major with a wry, devastating grin.
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
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
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, 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
When they said repent repent
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
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
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, 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
When they said repent repent
“A prophet of doom serenades the apocalypse in C major with a wry, devastating grin.”
By the late 1980s, Leonard Cohen had already died and been resurrected more times than any artist had a right to.
His career had cratered in the early '80s, his album "Various Positions" (home to "Hallelujah") rejected outright by Columbia Records in the United States.
But the success of "I'm Your Man" in 1988 had restored him to relevance, and when he retreated to work on its follow-up, the world was convulsing around him.
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
The Soviet Union dissolved.
The first Gulf War erupted.
Los Angeles burned in the Rodney King riots.
Cohen, sequestered in his modest duplex on South Tremaine Avenue in Los Angeles — a man who had lived on the Greek island of Hydra, studied in a Zen monastery, and wandered through the wreckage of multiple decades — watched it all with the eyes of an Old Testament prophet who also happened to enjoy a good suit.
"The Future" was born not from hope at the Cold War's end, but from a bone-deep suspicion that what was coming next would be far worse than what it replaced.
The recording sessions for "The Future" stretched from 1990 to 1992, primarily at Cohen's home studio and at various Los Angeles facilities.
Cohen was a notorious perfectionist — or, more accurately, a notorious self-doubter — who could spend years circling a single song.
Producer Steve Lindsey, along with co-producers Cohen, Bill Ginn, Leanne Ungar, and Rebecca De Mornay (yes, the actress, who was Cohen's partner at the time and served as a creative confidante), helped shape a sound that was radically different from the stripped-down synth-pop of "I'm Your Man." The title track opens with a swirling, almost liturgical keyboard drone before Cohen's voice — that impossibly deep, tobacco-cured instrument — enters like a judge reading a sentence.
The production is dense and layered: programmed drums lock into a relentless 113 BPM groove, female backing vocals (including Jennifer Warnes, Cohen's longtime vocal foil) provide an almost gospel-choir counterweight to his nihilism, and synthesizers create a wall of sound that feels simultaneously cheap and monumental.
The key of C major is a masterstroke of irony — the most innocent, unadorned key in Western music deployed in service of lyrics about crack, anal sex, and murder.
The lyrics of "The Future" operate on a level of provocation that remains startling decades later.
Cohen's opening gambit — "Give me back my broken night / My mirrored room, my secret life / It's lonely here, there's no one left to torture" — establishes the narrator as someone so appalled by the emerging new world order that he'd prefer the familiar darkness of his own depravity.
The song escalates through a catalog of deliberate outrages: demands for crack and anal sex, the Berlin Wall and Stalin, Christ and Hiroshima, all presented as preferable alternatives to the shapeless horror of a future without moral structure.
"I've seen the future, brother: it is murder" is one of the great prophetic lines in popular music, a phrase that gains weight with every passing year.
The recurring refrain — "When they said repent, repent, I wonder what they meant" — is vintage Cohen: simultaneously theological, comedic, and devastating.
He isn't mocking repentance; he's genuinely asking, from the depths of a soul that has studied every sacred text and found them all both true and insufficient, what salvation could possibly look like in a world where "the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and overturned the order of the soul." Released in November 1992, "The Future" the album arrived at a moment of profound cultural uncertainty.
Bill Clinton had just been elected president.
The optimism of the post-Cold War "end of history" thesis was already curdling into something more anxious.
Critics recognized the title track as something extraordinary.
The album reached number one in several European countries and was certified gold in Canada.
In the United States, its reception was more muted commercially but fervent critically.
The song received an enormous second life when Oliver Stone selected it for the soundtrack of "Natural Born Killers" in 1994, where its apocalyptic energy perfectly matched Stone's fever-dream satire of media violence.
This placement introduced Cohen to an entirely new generation of listeners who might never have encountered his work otherwise, and cemented the song's status as a cultural touchstone for millennial dread.
Three decades on, "The Future" stands as perhaps the most prescient song in Leonard Cohen's catalog — which is saying something for an artist whose entire body of work reads like dispatches from eternity.
Every year, the song becomes less a provocation and more a simple description of reality.
The line about things sliding "in all directions" with nothing left to measure anticipated the post-truth era with eerie precision.
The song's influence echoes through the work of artists from Nick Cave to Radiohead to Father John Misty — anyone who has tried to stare into the abyss while maintaining a sense of dark humor and formal elegance.
Within Cohen's own discography, it represents the apex of his middle-period reinvention: the moment when the gentle poet of "Suzanne" and "Bird on the Wire" fully became the gravelly-voiced apocalyptic sage who would dominate his final decades.
Cohen himself seemed to understand the song's weight.
He performed it at nearly every concert for the rest of his life, often opening shows with it, letting that prophetic declaration — "I've seen the future, brother: it is murder" — hang in the air like incense in a cathedral that's already on fire.
