(Hum) Hallelujah

I would like to repost a piece I found by accident but that fits well with many of the themes found in this Blog.  This paper by Michael Barthel not only features a Fall Out Boy song I have always enjoyed but traces the roots of the song's inspiration.  It is not really about Fall Out Boy but Leonard Cohen's song "Hallelujah."  I would say Leonard Cohen's famous/ubiquitous/great song but as Barthel points out there is a storied history for the original song and cover versions are what has taken the song to greater heights.  You probably own Jeff Buckley's version or just the soundtrack to the OC.  Either way, I admire the well traced ethnography of this special song.

A snippet, the link, then the original link I was watching.

"It Doesn't Matter Which You Heard": the Curious Cultural Journey of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"

by Michael Barthel

Let me take you back to the long-ago time of mid-February, 2007. Popular emo band Fall Out Boy had the number one album in the country and, being a responsible music critic, I of course illegally downloaded it. As my train crossed the Manhattan Bridge, I reached track five on the album. And I heard this:

Fall Out Boy - "Hum Hallelujah" (clip) 

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."

What's now considered the definitive version of this song is by dreamy, dead troubadour Jeff Buckley. (Some people are even under the impression that Buckley's cover is the original version.)

Jeff Buckley - "Hallelujah" (clip) 

It's an almost unbearably sad song in this incarnation—slow, keening, and heartbroken. But originally it was something different.

Leonard Cohen - "Hallelujah (original)" (clip)
This is more like your uncle's band playing in a warehouse, assuming your uncle was weird and labored under the impression that he was a crooner. It passed into the public realm almost unnoticed, and remained that way for some time; in the major Cohen biography, published in 1996, there's no entry for the song in the index, despite the fact that the book's name is the same as the album on which "Hallelujah" originally appears.

It's a weird little song in this incarnation. Check out this sound. It's not sad--in fact, it's kinda funny. The entire performance is so hyperserious that it's almost satire. Certainly there's a healthy dose of irony here, especially in the sneeringly wry line "but you don't really care for music, do ya?" Cohen sings: "There's a blaze of light in every word, it doesn't matter which you heard, the holy or the broken Hallelujah," and the lyrics, far from being unremittingly dour, explore these different Hallelujahs—holy, broken, profane, transcendent.

On Cohen Live, an album recorded in part on a 1988 tour, Cohen radically revises the song. The tempo slows down drastically:

Leonard Cohen - "Hallelujah (live)" (clip)
More importantly, Cohen adds three new verses. Whereas the original begins with some light musician humor, the new first verse ends with the line "it's a cold and a very broken Hallelujah." Combined with the slower tempo, the overall effect is considerably sadder.

At the same time, Cohen explores even more Hallelujahs: a verse containing the line "I remember when I moved in you" is unambiguously about sex, and the final verse --also the original's final verse, and the only verse they share--is defiant, coming as close to shouting as Leonard Cohen can while declaring "Even though it all went wrong, I'll stand right here before the lord of song with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah."

Click here for the rest of Barthel's paper.

The original Leonard Cohen clip I was sent - The Theology of Leonard Cohen on Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Beast.