On August 27, the final night of the 2020 Republican National Convention, President Donald Trump and his family stood on a patch of blood-red carpeting at the bottom of the White House steps and gazed up at a Long Island tenor named Christopher Macchio. As he gesticulated with his swollen hands, Macchio gazed off in the distance, his mouth tugging at the corners into a Trumpian smirk. The song he was singing was Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”
The RNC had, of course, requested formal permission to use the song. And the Cohen estate had, of course, refused it, in keeping with a long tradition during the Trump era that has grown to include Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Neil Young, Phil Collins, Rihanna, Prince, and Nickelback. But, of course, they used it anyway.
The song was one Cohen labored over for five years, filling at least 80 notebooks with versions of its lyrics. When it was released, on his 1984 album Various Positions, it immediately sounded like a standard—Bob Dylan called it a prayer. Over the years, it became his most famous song, perhaps more well-known than Cohen himself. Its winding trip into the spotlight, by-way-of covers from John Cale, Jeff Buckley, and others, was odd enough to occasion a whole book. The lyrics can be about almost anything—disappointment, the tug between the spiritual and the earthly, the divinity of sex—which makes it particularly adaptable. It has become the province of X-Factor auditions, ukulele YouTube covers, Shrek. It has passed out of the realm of Cohen’s ownership and into the culture at large, where it can be rendered into pablum.
And this is how it found its way onto the White House steps, a prayer about orgasm sung to a faux-pious thug and his coterie. The gesture was grotesque, but if Trump had meant in some way to affront the spirit of Leonard Cohen, he probably did not succeed.
Cohen always had an affinity for cheap things and bad taste—there’s a reason he stood behind a cheap Casio for Various Positions, foregoing the nylon acoustic of his most famous albums. He never liked Frank Sinatra but felt a kinship with Dean Martin, a kind of schmuck heartthrob who often acknowledged, with an audible shit-eating grin, that he wasn’t Sinatra. Cohen knew the act of performance was more than a little bit ridiculous, and anyone who performed could not be too far, in a cosmic sense, from Macchio bleating from a White House balcony.
Even on Cohen’s spartan, spare early works, you can sense a certain lingering affection for schmaltz: As the story goes, he learned a few chords and some fingerpicking patterns from a Spanish guitar player he met in a park one day as a teenager, and this was enough for him to craft an entire corpus of music. This is the mindset of someone who understands that style only needs a little bit of substance to undergird it, and that dramatic gestures carry their own weight. There’s a part of him, I imagine, that would have chuckled appreciatively at Macchio’s writhing hands, which seem to be caressing a side of beef only the singer could see; at his pinched, unnatural phrasing; and at the unearned pathos of the final high note.
Cohen also had an easy irony that probably would have allowed him a dry laugh at how easily his words could be repurposed to assuage would-be tyrants. “Let the man watching me know,” he once said, speaking of his own career, “that this is not entirely devoid of the con.” When his death was announced two days after the 2016 election, tyrants and con men had just won control of the White House. In the distended lurch of that moment, as the nation reeled off its axis, Cohen slipped away. He had always boasted immaculate dramatic timing.
Throughout the last four years, Cohen’s death seemed to haunt the space that opened up in the American psyche. Many have gravitated towards him, listening with a new intensity to his music and covering him with a resonance and frequency that is unusual, even for one of the most covered artists of the past half century. During the baleful winter of the Trump presidency, his songs seemed to be everywhere, passing like wraiths or hovering like clouds.
In the weeks after Cohen’s death, Kevin Morby began performing “Passing Through,” a folk standard that Cohen had made his own and released on his 1973 album Live Songs, alongside fellow singer-songwriter Nathaniel Rateliff during encores every night on tour. He’s been omnipresent ever since. Feist recorded “Hey That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” in 2017; Madonna offered a glam reading of “Hallelujah” at the 2018 Met Gala, surrounded by singers dressed as monks. Father John Misty, who sometimes seems like a charming grifter squatting in Leonard Cohen’s old house, has covered him more than once, and in 2020, he saw fit to record both “Anthem,” from 1992’s The Future, and “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong,” the finale from Cohen’s 1967 debut. Destroyer’s Dan Bejar pointed to Cohen’s late-career albums as inspiration for his dire, dry Have We Met. Even Haim, an upbeat group not known for their soulful longueurs, offered a spellbinding cover of “If It Be Your Will” last year.
Why was Leonard Cohen’s music whispering to us with such newfound intensity? I have been listening to him with an increased attention ever since November 2016—the ruinous election, the psychological fallout, that graceful asterisk of Cohen’s death—leaning close, like the dog in the old RCA Victor ads. There is something here I cannot shake, a message I am trying to record or a lesson I am trying hard to teach myself. Four years later, as we stagger back out of the chaos to confront the wreckage, I am still listening.
When Cohen died, he was in the process of introducing an album, You Want It Darker, that felt like a curtain rising on the first act of the cascading spiritual crises the country was about to enter. In the ensuing years, I have sometimes caught the feeling that someone was leering at me. Or winking. Someone, somewhere, was trying to remind me: Things have always been this way. Cruelty and chaos were the default settings against which moments of fleeting grace stood as contrast. You want it darker? I’ll kill the flame.
Regardless of your politics, a pervasive sense of doom and cynicism is now the cultural norm. It is this side of us that connects to, that requires, Cohen. It is as if he were our own personal Joel Grey, shuffling across the stage of our own 1920s Berlin, offering us a wry smile of complicity. One of Cohen’s most cynical songs gets more YouTube comments by the day: “Everybody knows that the deal is rotten…/Everybody knows the plague is coming.../Everybody knows the war is over; everybody knows the good guys lost.”
The fact that everybody knows this is the way things are—this is what connects him to a spirit much older than him. It is the wisdom of a European cabaret, the acid of Weill and Brecht. “There’s something arrogant and warlike about putting the world in order,” Cohen once observed. He had the dryly antic spirit of someone who knew just what a fool’s task it was to try. It was this sense that guided him through his entire life.
Cohen was born during the Great Depression in the upper-middle-class Jewish neighborhood of Westmount, outside of Montreal. From there, he watched WWII drift by from a comfortable distance. “Europe, the war, the social war… none of it seemed to touch us,” he recalled. He saw what was happening to Jews in Europe, and understood that its darkness that would always follow him around; he also carried the easy calm of someone certain it would never claim him entirely. He died just as the curtain began to fall on the liberal age.
By almost any account, he lived a charmed existence. He counted Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell as lovers. The only woman to definitively scorn him was Nico—he was so bereft he wrote a song about it. He was a poet, that most unpromising of commercial vocations, and yet somehow sold rock-star numbers of his poetry books before even stumbling upon actual rock stardom. He was the subject of adoring promotional films when he was only 30 years old, and as he sat in cafés musing and sipping, he already had his coterie among him. He carried an invisible card to some sort of republic of the soul; watching him airily bat around poetic notions over a half century of interviews is to watch a cat with a ball of yarn. In all his public appearances, he never once seemed perturbed.
Deep within, however, he was wracked by ambivalence. He was forever painfully connected to the notion that his life was one of fake, of fraud, of pantomime, that the poetry and the songs could feel as cheap one moment as they could feel boundless the next. “Good father, since I am broken down, no leader of the borning world, no saint for those in pain, no singer, no musician, no master of anything, no friend to my friends, no lover to those who love me, only my greed remains to me, biting into every minute that has not come with my insane triumph,” he wrote in 1972’s poetry collection The Energy of Slaves. Performance, for him, was a ridiculous necessity, one that fed his ego and his bank account and also filled him with bouts of self-loathing. It was this uneasiness with his own visibility—he burned for it, he recoiled from it—that made him who he was. He was born like this; he had no choice; he was born with the gift of the golden voice.
Later in his career, he became known for the elaborate artifice of his stage show. Anyone who saw him on his endless revue in the last decade of his life has the image of it seared into their minds: A thin old man in a tailored suit, hat shading his eyes, with fine rugs laid out before him so that he could fall to his creaking knees and pantomime gestures of devotion. He was playing a hotel singer, a hack that sang to bored audiences dabbing their mouths with white napkins. Inherent in his performance was a winking reminder, a note he never stopped sounding: Remember, all of us up here are debasing ourselves. We are all liars.
It is this galactic weariness that we seemed to be turning to in the Trump era, more than the sensuality or swagger that earlier generations have mined from his catalog. Artists who cover him now are in search of a mood, a tone—to cover Leonard Cohen is to light some candles, to invoke him. This fall, Aimee Mann covered the dire “Avalanche” for an HBO true-crime documentary series, Perfume Genius performed a devotional rendition of “Bird on a Wire” for KCRW, and the lacerating punk quartet Porridge Radio recorded a stunning version of “Who by Fire” in a deserted church, a properly Cohen-esque setting.
Indeed, some of the most faithful renditions of his work don’t even happen to be covers, which brings us to Leonard Cohen’s most faithful practitioner and disciple: Lana Del Rey. The singer born Lizzy Grant carries herself with a similar charmed-life/doomed-soul mystique, wandering inside a snow globe of invisible miseries. In her music, as with Cohen’s, all the bad things have already happened, are still happening, and all that’s left to do is to watch with cool anomie and redeem the surroundings with gestures of style, wit, and precision. Loneliness is sexy, and sex is lonely. On “Video Games,” she made giving head sound as desolate and sad as Cohen did on “Chelsea Hotel #2”—a song, not coincidentally, that Lana has covered.
She shares his fascination with artifice, as well. For Cohen, daring to assume the stage might mean striding in wearing a safari suit, and cracking a whip, as he did on his first major tour; for Lana, it might mean suspending a country porch swing from the ceiling of the Hollywood Bowl. The stage is a place for pageantries, a space in which you are meant to be as dry and ridiculous and committed as possible. It is a place to share with everyone what a liar you are, and for everyone to believe every word you sing.
On her 2019 album Norman Fucking Rockwell!, Lana claimed her place as a Leonard Cohen stand-in—a sardonic poet who provided a bracing shot of formality, a weary spirit standing comfortingly amidst chaos. “The culture is lit/And if this is it/I had a ball,” she sighed on “the greatest.” The album ends with a song called “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have.” It’s a prayer of sorts, the provisional kind that you only share with one other person. During the barren cultural landscape of the past four years, hope has become an almost metaphysical concern—the burden of maintaining it when every day brings endless reasons to snuff it out.
Hope, severed from evidence, becomes faith. Of his “Hallelujah,” Cohen once said, “Regardless of what the impossibility of the situation is, there is a moment when you open your mouth and you throw open your arms… and you just say ‘Hallelujah! Blessed is the name.’”
“Hope is a dangerous thing” could never be said to contain an affirmation so ringing as “Hallelujah.” Like Cohen, Lana wrote as a poet, a woman whose life’s work was words, who knew there was nothing she could really say—“Writing in blood on my walls/’Cause the ink in my pen don’t work in my notepad,” she murmured. The melody has a florid, sighing shape that recalls early Cohen, flowing over eight bars and winding its way back to the root note like a white handkerchief tossed over one shoulder. “Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have,” she sings over and over, before ending the song with the even fainter admission, “but I have it,” singing the words so haltingly they are almost illegible. It’s not a resounding declaration; it’s not a victory march. It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.
