Hallelujah
I’ve been a fan of Leonard Cohen for a while now. He’s kind of an acquired taste, but so are many worthwhile things. On a related note, Chris got into ‘The West Wing’ a while ago, and from that had me buy a copy of Jeff Buckley’s ‘Grace’ album for his cover of ‘Hallelujah.’
I gotta admit, the cover is excellent, and changes the song completely. What I didn’t realize was that Hallelujah has become a complete cliche, and was used dozens of time in various versions, n TV shows and movies.
But wait, it gets better - it was used so often that there’s an excellent paper about the songs, how its used and what it all means. The bad news is that all of the ambiguity, complexity and politics of the original are lost, and it becomes a signifier of loss and sadness. Ahh well.
What they’re singing there, aside from what I believe professionals call “twaddle,” is the chorus of a Leonard Cohen song. This is mildly incredible. Twenty-five years ago, a character on the TV show The Young Ones named Neal–the hippie–said, “I’m beginning to feel like a Leonard Cohen record, cause nobody ever listens to me.” Today, in contrast, one particular Leonard Cohen song is featured prominently in no less than three separate episodes of teen uberdrama The OC, and can be heard in at least twenty-four separate movies and TV episodes, almost always as the soundtrack to a montage of people being sad.
What I hope to show today is how, exactly, that happened to a song called “Hallelujah.”
The author is Michael Barthel and the paper is “It Doesn’t Matter Which You Heard”: the Curious Cultural Journey of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. Well worth a read.
