Songs are everywhere. We buy them and play them, of course, but we are also
subjected to them in pubs, cafes, lifts and shops. You see people in cars
singing along to the radio, and on trains they nod and rock to their MP3
players. Unthinkingly, we stroll along humming the latest pop pap. A
visiting alien might reasonably conclude that we are sustained by songs
rather than air, food or water. Songs are thus the dominant expressive form
of our time. Yet most of them barely exist in our consciousness at all.
Mass-produced drivel, they drift around the charts for a week or two,
insinuate themselves into some particularly indiscriminating part of our
brain for a while, and then are gone. Some have an afterlife as instant mood
music for television shows, films or advertisements. But, by and large,
songs are the supremely disposable art form of our time.
The exceptions are obvious. A few songs or performances are good enough to
last, and some are just bad but evocative, and are therefore continuously
recycled. Abba’s songs aren’t as good as everybody says they are, but they
work in a way that makes them eminently usable. Equally, almost any rubbish
that struck it big in the late 1960s can now be used to sell stuff to the
moist-eyed middle-aged, who have discovered, to their infinite sorrow, that
they were not, in the event, born to be wild.
All of which brings me to the story of one particular song that seems, through
some mysterious alchemy, to have done everything a modern song can do.
Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah has been papped, drivelled, exploited and
massacred. It has also produced some very great performances, and it is, in
truth, a very great song. In a fundamental sense, at least partly intended
by Cohen, it is a song about the contemporary condition of song.
Even if you think you haven’t heard it, I can guarantee you have. It has been
covered by, among many others, Allison Crowe, kd lang, Damien Rice, Bono,
Sheryl Crow and Kathryn Williams. Bob Dylan has sung it live, a performance
that has, apparently, been bootlegged. It has been used in films and on
television. Rufus Wainwright sang it on the soundtrack of Shrek, Jeff
Buckley’s version was used on The West Wing and The OC, John Cale sang it on
Scrubs, and so on. Cale’s is the best version I have heard — pure, cold and
scarcely inflected at all, it sends shivers down the spine.
Other songs may have been covered more — in Cohen’s oeuvre, Suzanne, with 124
versions, and Bird on the Wire, with 78, come out ahead of, at the last
count, Hallelujah’s 44. And other songs may have made it onto more
soundtracks. But there is something unique about Hallelujah, something that
tells us a great deal about who we now are.
Cohen recorded it on his 1985 album Various Positions. It seemed destined, at
that point, to remain in the same memory vault as most of his work. Fans
would love it, aficionados would acknowledge it as a fine piece of
songwriting, but otherwise it would just be an addition to the repertoire of
great Cohen songs, a large though highly specialised musical sector.
Then, in 1994, Jeff Buckley released a version on his album Grace. This sold
millions worldwide, and Grace’s status was finally and fully elevated to
“legendary” when Buckley drowned in the Mississippi in 1997. He was the son
of Tim Buckley, an extraordinary singer-songwriter who had also died young
in mysterious circumstances. A wild and fatal romanticism seemed to hang
over the family, over Grace and over the song that everybody found
themselves singing from that album, Hallelujah. It was, unquestionably,
Buckley’s version rather than Cohen’s that was to make the song universally
recognisable.
This is fair enough. Buckley, like his father, had a phenomenal vocal range,
and Cohen, famously, has not. Many of Cohen’s best songs — Alexandra
Leaving, Famous Blue Raincoat — are exactly suited to his low groan. But
Hallelujah is not. It needs to be sung, and Buckley really sang it,
whispering and screaming his way through its bitter verses. His
interpretation is a little lush for me, but it was better than Cohen’s, and
it was exactly that lush- ness that projected it onto all those soundtracks
and caught the attention of all those other singers.
What then became really odd about the song was the utterly contradictory way
in which it was used and understood. This was, in part, due to the fact that
Cohen seems to have written at least two versions. The first ended on a
relatively upbeat note:
“And even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand before the Lord of Song With
nothing on my tongue but hallelujah!” It was this ending, curiously, that
Dylan especially liked, as he told Cohen over coffee after a concert in
Paris. Cohen sang him the last verse, saying it was “a rather joyous song”.
(Incidentally, during the same conversation, Cohen told Dylan that
Hallelujah had taken a year to write. This startled Dylan. He pointed out
that his average writing time was about 15 minutes.) Anyway, for once,
Dylan’s taste had led him astray, because the bleaker ending in the Buckley
version is much better, in the sense that it is more consistent. There is no
redemptive Lord of Song, the only lesson of love is “how to shoot at someone
who outdrew you” and the only hallelujah is “cold and broken”.
Encouraged by this apparently official duality, subsequent covers tinkered
here and there with the words to the point where the song became protean, a
set of possibilities rather than a fixed text. But only two possibilities
predominated: either this was a wistful, ultimately feelgood song or it was
an icy, bitter commentary on the futility of human relations.
It is easy to justify the first reading. There are the repeated hallelujahs of
the soothingly hymn-like chorus, and there is a gently rocking tunefulness
about the whole thing. This, if you didn’t listen too closely, was what made
it such perfect material for that supremely vacuous show The OC. Young, rich
people — especially in California — often feel the need to look soulful and
deep on camera, and the sound of doomed, youthful Buckley sighing Hallelujah
as they all pondered the state of their relationships must have seemed about
right.
