Yes, yes – a million times yes.
Alexandra Burke – the pointless insult to proper musicians that has won this year’s X Factor…
Hallelujah is fragile and personal, and hearing this wailing cookie-cutter nobody wobbling her way through it is offensive…
A characteristic of Simon Cowell’s multi-headed, music killing monster is the emptiness you see in its eyes. Take a look at that video again. Is there a soul behind those eyes?
Get in.
Jeff Buckley made number two; even Leonard Cohen’s original made number 38.
Get thee behind me, Satan.
Isn’t it great when someone else completely agrees with you and expresses it so perfectly?
Hallelujah is a song that I think has languished for a long time unheralded – probably because the original is so odd and because Cohen was hardly de rigeur in the 80s and 90s. It was used on the film ‘Basquiat’ in about 2001, then more visibly in ‘Shrek’ a year or so later. It came to Cowell’s attention in 2006, when the winner of the American Stars in their Eyes sang it (probably because the producers had watched Shrek). Cowell, of course, being the consummate renaissance man and musical scholar, had never heard it before.
The version used in Shrek was by John Cale and is, as far as I know, unreleased (Rufus Wainwright provided the version used on the soundtrack album) though you can see Cale performing it in concert on YouTube. Cale’s version is similar to the original only in that the vocalist appears to understand the meaning of the words. Other than that, Cale’s is superior to Cohen’s in that Cale can (and does) sing, but inferior in that it doesn’t have the scale and artistry of Cohen’s bonkers arrangement.
One thing the reviewer gets wrong though, is in relation to the gospel style – the original (though none of the covers until now as far as I know) had a full gospel choir singing the chorus. This is what actually made it so bonkers, because the languid spoken baritone poetry of the verses was suddenly interrupted by a thumping bass guitar and a full gospel chorus.
Where the reviewer is absolutely right is in the importance of understanding the words while you are singing, something last year’s winner, Leona Lewis, does admirably with Snow Patrol’s Run (at no. 3, I believe). There is guilt, anger, pity, sorrow and provocation in Hallelujah – Cale gets it, Buckley gets it, Aled Jones, Katherine Jenkins and now Alexandra, don’t.
A small mention of Hana Pestle, whose interpretation, available on iTunes, is captivating. It’s the one I listen to at home, anyway, because even though it isn’t quite perfect, at least unlike Cowell’s, it’s not crass, vulgar, empty, soulless and desecratory. It also doesn’t feature a vocalist apparently performing vibrato using her lips (as if – Whitney Houston did this, presumably for a joke, a decade ago so now everyone on talent shows tries it – vibrato comes from the palate you ignorant fucks), and doesn’t sound like it was arranged in half an hour by a sub-Pete Waterman wannabe on crack.
Haven’t heard the Hana Pestle version – will check it out, thanks.
Bear in mind that Hallalujah has been covered so often that Radio 4 had a documentary about its life as a standard a couple of months ago. And it was really John Cale who started it all!
The Cale version has been released – it was on the very influential album of Cohen tributes released in 1989 or 1990 called I’m Your Fan. (R.E.M. did their famous cover of First We Take Manhattan on the same album.) Cale’s version effectively presented the template for the song that Buckley and almost everyone else subsequently followed.
Oh fuck right off all of you.
If I had managed to complete my entry to the Cultural Review of the Year (sorry Sir, the hamster ate my homework – well actually I moved house, and ran out of time) my runner-up in “Cultural Nadir of the Year” was going to be the elevation of “Hallelujah” to the level of some kind of secular hymn, when in actual fact it’s just “Smoke on the Water” for acoustic guitar.
Ya wanna seem all spiritual, and, y’know, like, distant, yet in touch? Play Hallelujah. The lyrics are so deep, man.
Oh fuck off. As Johnny Mercer once said, “I could eat alphabet soup and shit better lyrics.”
The most laughable comment I heard on the radio slagging off the Alexandra Burke version was when it was described as “the karaoke version”. Now bear in mind there are a supposedly 750 recorded versions of this shit, that means there are somewhere in this world 750 permissions approved by The Emperor Cohen for people to, er, “get up on the mic and have a bash.”
It may be a shit version of the song, but it’s a shit song. I heard that documentary on Radio 4 (curiously its presenter, Grant Garvey, was going to make a cameo appearance in my winner of Cultural Nadir of the Year). In between banging my head against the car window wishing for a better world, I couldn’t help but notice the gloss put on the reason for its success, namely that Cohen had kudos amongst the twittering classes, but he had never released it as a single. The fact it had cod-religious imagery made it catnip to those for whom surface beats content. I bet “I Am Kloot” are at this very moment touting their entire back catalogue to acoustic guit/vocs the world over. And quite frankly if Simon Cowell picks it up and they make oodles of cash out of it GOOD FUCKING LUCK TO THEM. After all, that’s the only reason there are quite so many permissions signed off by Mr Cohen. Or are we to believe he is a modern day Guttenberg, bringing enlightenment to the masses?
And if any of you find it “spiritual” can I suggest you avoid a musical called “Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat”. It will blow your tiny fucking mind.
I always respect your opinion, Mr. Baby, even when you are so comically misguided and ball-crushingly wrong.
However, while I shall not criticise you on the grounds of taste (you can’t help being born without one of your senses) I must must pull you up on one point.
The fact that there are 1,000,008 cover versions of Hallelujah does not necessarily mean that Mr. Cohen has authorised them.
You are a learned man. You know a little of intellectual property. You therefore know that a song’s composer is not necessarily the controller of that song’s publishing rights.
By way of example I refer the honourable gentleman to the ownership of the publishing rights to most of Lennon-McCartney’s pre-1967 compositions. You may recall Mr. McCartney (as he then was) falling out with his friend Mr. Jackson of Wacko when the latter bought the publishing rights of Northern Songs in 1985.
Paul and Yoko were therefore not even consulted when those geniuses in the marketing department at John Lewis chose to defile From Me To You for the department store’s Christmas TV adverts this year.
I do not know who owns the pubishing rights to Mr. Cohen’s back catalogue but it is very simplistic for you to assume that Laughing Len personally approves all recorded covers of Hallelujah.
Oh, and Gutenberg only has one t.
Love you!
As the author of aa work he would be recognised and have rights in accordance with which ever intellectual property statute prevails in either his native Canada or USA, depending on the contract he has with Sony and/or any other publishing company he may have a contract with (including one that he owns).
So either he owns the rights and would have right of veto (and covers do have to be approved by original artists) or he’s sold them, in which case nobody can really complain. That was his choice.