So, which version of the great song is going to hit the Christmas number one spot tomorrow? In one sense, I don’t really care. Cohen goes to the bank and recovers some of the millions his finance bloke nicked and a brilliant example of song-writing gets heard by a generation growing up on pap.
Mark suggests that this is music for adolescents and I wonder how old he is. Why? Because I grew up in the seventies when Leonard Cohen’s songs were called ‘songs to slit your wrists to’ – dour, morose and ‘deep’. But, contrary to Mark’s perception, I have found Cohen’s lyrics still haunt me after all these years in a way that few others’ do. Cockburn is a poet, Dylan gets behind the safe places of the mind and scratches away, Clapton captures the blues in a way few others can – and Cohen is a craftsman who creates lyrics that work at lots of levels.
Whatever we conclude about taste, though, the powerful thing about ‘Hallelujah’ is the way he suffuses spirituality with physicality and vice versa. He refuses to allow the dichotomy that disembodies spirituality and tacitly embraces Plato. This is why I think it is so good that this Christmas we will have a song at number one in the charts that ‘gets’ the point of Christmas: God opting into a messy and complicated world – not helping people escape from it. That, it seems to me, is what the Incarnation is all about. The Word became flesh – and we shouldn’t try to reverse the process just because it is less complicated.
Anyway, I’m visiting my parents in Liverpool and will reflect in the next couple of days on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s interviews on the global financial crisis and the possibilities for disestablishment of the Church of England. I bet you can’t wait…
December 24, 2008 at 9:17 am
“Mark suggests that this is music for adolescents and I wonder how old he is.”
50 going on 18, according to my family. Yeah, I spend too long in front of youtube listening to songs my children think are dreck. Some of them are, some are pretty good. I think I am just recalling fondly what it was like to be that age. Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ must have passed me by – I think I first heard it when I took the kids to Shrek. I have listened to a couple of versions since – Jeff Buckley’s does seem to come into the wrist-slitting class, whereas Alexandra Burke’s – well, what can one say? I have never watched ‘The X Factor’ or ‘American Idol’ (Deo gratias!), but the opening lines of the song do sum up what Simon Cowell and that whole narcissistic, autoerotic enterprise are about:
‘You don’t really care for music, do you?’
As for the song itself, it has a pleasant tune but it gets monotonous after 80 verses. The lyrics? Cohen’s old parasitic trick of mixing some distorted biblical allusions (remember Suzanne: ‘Now Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water’) with another angst-ridden failed love affair. I don’t suppose one listener in a thousand to Alexandra Burke (if they can make out the words) has a clue who ‘David’ is in the song, or ‘the holy dove’ that supposedly coos during coitus. (And those who do may take sex waaay too seriously!)
Is it ‘poetry’? Yeee-s – of the 1970s Rod McKuen school, perhaps. Not Seamus Heaney or Pablo Neruda.
I think you’re a bit hard of Plato, Nick! CS Lewis, Augustine of Hippo and a whole host of Church Fathers had a different view of his views.
I’ll stick with Handel’s Hallelujah this year – better lyrics and music, IMAO. Of course, ‘de gustibus non disputandum est’.
A Blessed Nativity to you.
May 9, 2009 at 10:03 am
[...] language of religion and applied it to sex and physical experience?’ My response? ‘No, Cohen has understood what many Christians have failed to grasp: that God is interested in the whole of life and not just [...]
August 30, 2010 at 2:09 pm
[...] remember getting into big trouble for suggesting that 19 year old Alexandra Burke couldn’t possibly sing Leonard Cohen’s epic song [...]