Smash hit

But, of course, Cohen doesn’t write songs like that. What he most commonly does is pour highly concentrated acid into very sweet and lyrical containers. Never in his entire career has he done this as well as he did in the second version of Hallelujah. The song begins with a statement about the pointlessness of art. Addressing a woman, Cohen writes of a secret chord discovered by King David. But he knows the woman doesn’t really care for music. Nevertheless, he describes the lost music, as if to Bathsheba, the woman whose beauty overthrew David:

“Well, it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth The minor fall and the major lift The baffled king composing hallelujah.”

The art is futile, because the woman doesn’t care. Instead, she humiliates and destroys the man, though, even as she does so, “from your lips she drew the hallelujah”. Man needs woman more than he needs art. The ejaculated hallelujah — a cry of praise to the Lord — is drawn forth not by David’s secret chord, but by his subjugation to Bathsheba. The remainder of the song brilliantly weaves this theme through a cinematic description of a failed affair, combined with strange but delicate images of a military parade, a “holy dove” and a western shoot-out. The fourth verse comes close to a genuinely optimistic eroticism.

“But remember when I moved in you And the holy dove was moving too And every breath we drew was hallelujah.”

Times Archive, 1985: Leonard Cohen live at Hammersmith

Cohen will survive his present renaissance and a few more besides

BACKGROUND

• Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah: A perfect fit in words and music

• How Leonard Cohen became an X Factor winner

• Hallelujah for Hallelujah

• Hallelujah - a song that outgrew itself

The fight for a Hallelujah Christmas victory

X Factor winner Alexandra Burke's version of Hallelujah will be No 1 unless outraged Jeff Buckley fans can sabotage it

• Hallelujah: how Leonard Cohen became an X Factor winner without trying

• X Factor's Alexandra Burke breaks Leona Lewis record

• X factor winner Alexandra Burke favourite for Christmas No1

But the lover concludes that there is nothing more to love than a “cold and broken hallelujah”. Sexual love is, sadly, what we need, but is it what we want? It is hard to imagine a more bitterly subversive and countercultural question.

The aesthetic trick at the heart of this is the undermining of the word hallelujah. It means praise to the Lord, but it is, basically, just a musical sound, like lalala or yeah, yeah, yeah. Describing the chord structure in those three lines in the first verse makes the words, sort of literally, into the music. Similarly, the chorus, which consists simply of the repetition of the word, is pure song, in which the words and music are inseparable. And it is a pure pop song or contemporary hymn — a catchy, uplifting tune and a comforting word. It has almost a sing-along quality. The words become the happy tune, the tune gets into your head and, once there, reveals itself as a serpent. For what you will actually be singing along to is arid sex, destroyed imagination, misogyny and emotional violence.

All of these have to be gone through to get to the “hallelujah”: a romantic affirmation, certainly, but only of the pain of our predicament. After that conversation with Dylan, Cohen compared himself to Flaubert, meaning only that he was a slow writer. But he was more right than he knew. Like Flaubert, he sees the erotic as a kind of poison, deadening the artist and dragging him back to earth; and, like Flaubert, he delights in describing this awful insight.

So, the Hallelujah that adorns the flaccid sexual crises in The OC and adds soul to the babbling shenanigans of The West Wing is a brilliant fake. It sounds like a pop song, but it isn’t. Like the Velvet Underground’s Heroin, Bob Dylan’s Leopard-Skin Pill- Box Hat, John Phillips’s Let It Bleed, Genevieve or even Frank Sinatra’s I Get Along Without You Very Well, it is a tuneful but ironic mask worn to conceal bitter, atonal failure.

Of course, this is such an effective aesthetic trick precisely because of the way songs have seeped into our lives. Instrumental versions of Heroin or Let It Bleed, Genevieve — the first advocating the nihilism of addiction, the second about a man who cares nothing for his girlfriend miscarrying in the basement — would go perfectly well in a lift or clothes shop, just as Hallelujah can slot into almost any television show you can imagine.

These works use familiarity, even banality, as a weapon. They remind us that, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, there is a real world beyond the pap, that perhaps we should try listening rather than just hearing, that words like hallelujah just need a brief touch of genius to be brought back to life, and that Leonard Cohen, who was 70 last year, needs to be with us for a good few years yet. Check out the Cale version: erotic failure never felt so good.

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