30 Dec 22 | Issue 49
We were sitting on the hotel balcony... Look, cut me some slack here, it's the first time in almost thirty years that the brood haven't been with us. I booked a hotel room so Christmas wouldn't feel too weird without unconscious children (mine, please note) littering the floor, tears during meltdowns, or tears during Love, Actually.
There we were, on the balcony, glass in hand, listening to the carol service down in the forecourt, when, almost causing me to splutter my drink over the balustrade onto the singers below, they start a rendition of Hallelujah. Managing to swallow and not spit I turn to Anne incredulous, saying they can not know the meaning of the lyrics.
I've never been completely able to comprehend the definition of hyperreality. Well, I do, but should someone at a party ask me to define it – which would mean it was either a really good party or a terrible one — I'd be fine if I rattled off "the inability to distinguish 'The Real' from the signifier of it". If I then slipped in Baudrillard's definition "the generation by models of a real without origin or reality" I might feel the festive ice thinning under my feet should my imaginary fellow guest ask for an example.
Now, thanks to those carol singers, instead of plunging into a metaphorical frozen lake of uncertainty, I can glibly refer to the song Hallelujah. I should say Leonard Cohen's song Hallelujah. And this is where our story starts.
Even as a Leonard Cohen admirer for many years I was under the illusion it was Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah. To unwrap why carol singers are serenading the bourgeoisie and the overly-affluent with a paean to orgasms both satisfying and failed we need to qualify a few terms.
Here's the original lyric
Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do ya?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing "Hallelujah"Your faith was strong, but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew ya
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the HallelujahYou say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well, really, what's it to ya?
There's a blaze of light in every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken HallelujahI did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool ya
And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the lord of song
With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah
I would interpret them as using religious imagery to allude to the orgasm. I have a stronger reason than just my alluding. We shall return to that later. Here's Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Nothing to do with our song, other than being a counterpoint using the orgasm as allusion to religious belief.
(On a side note, the first time I visited Rome, Anne proposed a Bernini tour. I was very excited. I had drunk a delicious Bernini in Harry's Bar during our honeymoon in Venice. With a sense of deflation I discovered he was a sculptor, and it was not to be a bar crawl).
Simulation is the muddling of 'reality' and representation. "It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal."
The simulacrum is usually defined in terms of hyperreality as a copy with no original. Baudrillard prefers that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right.
Cohen penned the song sometime in the early eighties, while in his fifties. Walter Yetnikoff, the president of his then record label CBS, said 'What is this? This isn't pop music. We're not releasing it. This is a disaster'. The song didn't emerge until he had a new deal, released on the album Various positions in 1984. It was not a hit.
(Anyone think Various positions has sexual connotations?).
John Cale then covers it in 1991. John Cale, ex Velvet Underground member, is perhaps the one person with both a more sombre voice and mordant sense of musical humour than Cohen. Cale is a sort of Cohen extreme. He asked Cohen for the lyrics and received a fax containing fifteen verses back. He chooses these three.
Baby, I've been here before.
I know this room, I've walked this floor.
I used to live alone before I knew ya.
Yeah I've seen your flag on the marble arch,
But listen, love is not some kind of victory march,
No it's a cold and it's a very broken Hallelujah.There was a time you let me know
What's really going on below,
Ah but now you never show it to me, do ya?
Yeah but I remember, yeah when I moved in you,
And the holy dove, she was moving too,
Yes every single breath that we drew was Hallelujah.Maybe there's a god above,
As for me, all I've ever seemed to learn from love
Is how to shoot at someone who outdrew ya.
Yeah but it's not a complaint that you hear tonight,
It's not the laughter of someone who claims to have seen the light
No it's a cold and it's a very lonely Hallelujah.
Tell me that's not about the orgasm bringing you together, and then its absence as the relationship fails. Most lyricists start with songs about fucking, then want to be seen as a serious writer. Cohen is perhaps unique in that he started as a respected poet and novelist. Then decided mid-thirties to become a pop star. His first band played country music. He knew what he was doing, using religious imagery for its powerful ready-made tropes, always keeping it ambiguous. He was a spiritual man, and of course a serious drug fiend. He became an ordained Buddhist monk. Surely that indicates his views on Western religion.
It wasn't a hit for Cale either.
Jeff Buckley gets to hear John Cale's version a year later. Jeff Buckley is a sort of alt-rock wasted romantic whiskey in the desert sort of guy. It would be total conjecture to say his reading is influenced by being the estranged son of heroin, pills and alcohol overdose legend Tim Buckley. He includes it on his only album in 1994. Again, not a hit.
Then in 2001 the tale takes an amusing turn. The team making Shrek pick the song to represent the titular anti hero's sadness in choosing loneliness. They understood the lyrics are about a failed relationship. With a mortal being. What is now being fought over by the Jewish and Catholic faiths as a hymn to God 1, came to light as an ogre break-up song.
The soundtrack recording has Rufus Wainwright's version of the song, while the movie features Cale's. Either because Wainwright's being gay prevented his being used in a kids film — albeit a deliberately adult humoured one — or Cale would cost more to licence, not being signed to the production company.
Shall we just rewind all of this. We have a song written by arch miserabilist Leonard Cohen. Let's pause here. I've spent forty years listening to a different Leonard Cohen. When people say 'Oh, he's depressing' I hear Diamonds in the Mine, my first exposure to Leonard’s music to stick with me, in the mid-eighties. Arch piss-taker more like it, if you ask me.
We segue to avant-garde noise-drone-rock savant John Cale, who was one of the pianists in the first full-length performance of Erik Satie's Vexations. Mainly famous for writing aggressive, coke-fuelled paranoid discordant dirges. Then a large green ogre teaches the opening verses to hundreds of children.
Meanwhile Jeff Buckley, compared to his other compositions, is honing Hallelujah into something akin in tone to his father's Song To The Siren, made famous by Elizabeth Fraser and This Mortal Coil. It gets used in the final episode of The West Wing.
Baudrillard lists four steps in a simulacrum becoming a truth in its own right.
basic reflection of reality
perversion of reality
pretence of reality (where there is no model)
simulacrum, which "bears no relation to any reality whatsoever"
Given John Cale picked the three most salacious verses, we know he's down with perversion of reality, and, having read Cohen's Beautiful Losers when I was 18, written on hashish, acid and amphetamines — which is impressive in itself, and, if memory serves me, features a protagonist who spends a large part of the novel masturbating in a tree — I think we can say Leonard's probably into the perversion of reality too. 2
Imogen Heap records a great version using just the two orgasm verses. To no avail. The damage is done. Shrek has burnt those first orgasm free verses into the minds of a new generation of singers. 3
Enter stage right, one Regina Spektor, born 1980, aged 11 when Shrek came out, and aged 25 performing it for the Jewish Heritage Festival. Giving Hallelujah it’s first religious reading. We live in a post-structuralist world. Ownership of meaning passes from the author's hand to the listener's interpretation. The synth driven cynicism of Leonard Cohen has been replaced by an instant Hallmark sentimentality — three and half minutes of deep feels before Mariah Carey hits and it's time for Bailey's top-up.
2008, Jason Castro (aged 4 when Shrek came out) sings the orgasm free version on American Idol. A show that invents pop stars by recycling popular songs. Hyperreality is here. In its wake the now drowned Jeff Buckley sentimental version hits the sweet spot in the iTunes chart. Alexandra Burke (aged 3 when Shrek came out) renders a soul version on Britain's The X Factor and achieves a Christmas no 1.
Finally Justin Timberlake (aged 10 when Shrek came out) records it in 2010 for Hope for Haiti Now, altering the chord structure to lose the melancholy and make it more uplifting. In doing so unmoors it from those opening lines "It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift". Which, in case you didn't realise, is Leonard telling just how he's manipulating your emotions using a classic chord progression. Literally — C, F, G, A-minor, F. 4
Hallelujah is now adrift in a sea of instant prayer and Christmas spirituality — a simulacrum, which "bears no relation to any reality whatsoever".
“I wanted to push the Hallelujah deep into the secular world, into the ordinary world. The Hallelujah, the David’s Hallelujah, was still a religious song. So I wanted to indicate that Hallelujah can come out of things that have nothing to do with religion.”
Leonard Cohen
Do me a solid. Which is cheerful London speak for asking for a favour. I’m currently in conversation with Susan Finlay and Rowena Macdonald, two authors who deserve a wider readership. Could you forward this email or recommend the site to a friend you think might appreciate it, to garner some more eyeballs for them. Start of a new year and all that.
Chromorama by Riccardo Falcinelli Buy here
Daughter very kindly gave me a copy of Riccardo Falcinelli’s Chromorama: How Colour Changed Our Way of Seeing for Christmas. It’s terrific fun. A philosophical slash sociological slash semiotical promenade through colour and its signifiers. Why does black mean mourning (in the West)? Why are pencil icons always yellow? Lots and lots of pictures, so ideal post indulgence reading.
This issue’s hero image by the amazing Fatima Fletcher features Vivienne Westwood. Who, you probably spotted wasn’t mentioned in the story of Hallelujah. But she did die in the week I was writing it. If there was a singular moment that changed my life, or set me on the path leading me to write this post you’re now reading, it would be my friend Alan — also sadly deceased — playing me Anarchy in the UK by Sex Pistols at the impressionable age of 14. Would there are been a Johnny Rotten without Queen Viv? The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen.
This week featured
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Cohen
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cale
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Buckley
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Buckley
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecstasy_of_Saint_Teresa
Buy me a coffee at www.buymeacoffee.com/vfnIE9P0Ta
Illustration by Fatima Fletcher
The amazing artist Fatima Fletcher is artist in residence.
Please show Fatima your love by following and liking every single one of her posts at www.instagram.com/fatima.fletcher, and visiting fatimafletcher.com, where her work is for sale, she is available for commissions.
Her wonderful Ruff Ruff coasters are for sale at fatima-fletcher.square.site/s/shop
Send to a friend
I’m currently interviewing a few more authors, and would love their work to reach a wider audience. If there’s someone you know who might enjoy these posts, please forward this email to them, or one you think better suited to wooing. Better still, ring them up, harangue, shout, threaten and coerce them into subscribing. Nicely, of course.
References
http://www.rsrevision.com/hallelujah.htm
https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/articles/broken-grace-leonard-cohen
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6236967
https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/americas/2016-11-12/ty-article/cohens-mysterious-view-of-god-left-this-religious-jew-breathless/0000017f-db9c-d3a5-af7f-fbbe2a4b0000
https://genius.com/John-cale-hallelujah-lyrics
https://genius.com/Jeff-buckley-hallelujah-lyrics
https://www.songlyrics.com/imogen-heap/hallelujah-lyrics/
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/jasoncastro/hallelujah.html
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/alexandraburke/hallelujah.html
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/justintimberlake/hallelujah.html
This chord progression is also the foundation of Bob Marley’s No Woman, No Cry, Iggy Pop’s The Passenger, The Chords’ Sh-Boom (The Crew Cuts covered it). See
and
Legally I have to tell you I might get five pence or something from Bookshop dot org should you purchase something, but really I just want to stick it to Amazon and keep independent bookshops alive. Yeah, rebel me, bringing the man down from the inside etc etc.
Not a proper comment, more a memory and a recommendation… My friend Lucy, a pianist in The Lost Jockey, was involved in a London performance of Vexations. She (and the other pianists) had to sightread because they could not memorise it and it stopped making sense when they looked at their hands. I brought in the new year listening to Satie’s bloody gorgeous Socrates. It’s on YouTube. And HNY.
Very good, didn't know that about Hallelujah. Not a deep thinker, me! But was reminded of being in a cafe in Whistler some years ago .. complete with families and teens having lunch. And then Zappa's Bobby Brown started playing! They were all completely oblivious! You hear what you hear I guess.