Blah, blah, blah: Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Leonard Cohen

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 you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

I 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 you
And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

So what on God's green earth could these two songs have to do with each other? One is nothing but blah-blah-blahs pasted together with the "moon-June-Saskatoon" cliches of bad love songs (and no. . . it doesn't actually have Saskatoon in it. Which makes me think of Peter Lorre in the Spike Jones version of My Old Flame: "No. . . it couldn't have been Moe. . .").

I love the Blah-Blah song, which was written by George and Ira Gershwin for a movie called Delicious in 1931.  But I am also irritated by it, mainly because nobody knows how to sing it. I've suffered through several YouTube performances, all of them awful except one (and I posted it already - I'll have to look it up). Almost everyone "blah-blahs" as if they don't remember the words. They roll their eyes and wring their hands and rack their brains and look as if they want to run offstage with embarrassment. But the joke is - and maybe people were cleverer in 1931 - THE WORDS DON'T MATTER. Nobody pays the slightest bit of attention to them. Furthermore, most love songs have crappy words anyway, so crappy they're interchangeable. There's a blueprint that most songwriters stick to, and it's tried and true, and banal and dull, and it works. 

OK then, whoof. How did I get from this blah-blah-blah thing to Leonard Cohen?

I think I am the last person on the planet who does NOT like Hallelujah. I just don't. The tune isn't. . . too. . .bad, but the lyric is a stinker. But that shouldn't be a problem, and do you know whyyy?

No one has ever noticed it.

No one has ever noticed this lyric ("it goes like this"), and I say this because people are constantly wanting to have it sung at weddings, or at confirmation services, or at baptisms. Why? Because it has the word "hallelujah" in it, probably sixteen or eighteen or twenty times.

It's not a dirty song or anything, but it's just all wrong: a typical angsty, brooding, narcissistic, self-involved, dark, vaguely profane, masturbatory Cohen thing. I'm not sure I want to hear that anywhere, let alone in church.

I read somewhere on a web site - Mormon or something - that the choir was asked by the minister to sing Hallelujah at a service. Everyone was on-board and very enthusiastic about it, because they all loved the song. They didn't have time to go over it at choir practice, but hey - they all knew the tune anyway! And they loved that chorus: Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, etc. Surely with a refrain like that, it must be a truly holy song.

Instead, it was more like: HOLY SHIT! The choir director, just as she was passing out the sheet music before the service, happened to just glance at the words, and the lines "you saw her bathing on the roof. . .she tied you to a kitchen chair, she broke your throne and she cut your hair. . . "

Actually, that IS pretty scriptural. Bathsheba liked to take her bath in public, especially if sexually-rampant men were watching.  And anyone familiar with scripture knows what happens next. (Adultery, anyone?). And didn't somebody get a hair cut at about that time? It was David, wasn't it? Or not. And I'm not too sure he was tied to a kitchen chair.

So they sang something else. They did Praise God From Whom All, or Blessed Be The, or I Praise Thy Whatever (or whatever they do in the Mormon church). And afterwards, everyone ran up to the choir director and said, "Awwwww. Why didn't you do Hallelujah?"

What the fuck do people think this song SAYS, anyway? True, it's sort of scriptural, but it was Samson who had the haircut, not David, losing all his strength to that wily succubus, Delilah. So scriptural accuracy is compromised, sliced and diced for his own convenience, but perhaps Cohen realized no one was going to notice it anyway. No one was going to notice any part of it except the refrain, and the word that's repeated sixeen times (or eighteen, or twenty-four, depending on how long the fade is).

I've written often about mondegreens, those misheard/mistranscribed words that swarm all over internet lyric sites. Bizarrely, the SAME mondegreens seems to be replicated over and over again, on every site. I don't know how this happens, unless there is a Badly Transcribed Song Lyric Central somewhere that has all the lyrics with all the errors, all the time.

I know they're mondegreens because I listen to the original version, with the original artist, sometimes more than one version, just to be sure.  So kids, it really ISN'T "s'cuse me while I kiss this guy". 

Hallelujah doesn't qualify as a mondegreen, at all. It's not misheard. It's an ignored lyric, or a disregarded lyric, or a lyric with an erroneous assumption attached to it that it will be a Truly Holy Song because it has the word Hallelujah repeated so many times it's like machine-gun fire. So in the church I used to go to, and suffered through (especially in the choir, which was abysmal), one woman said, "I'd really like to do the Leonard Cohen song, Hallelujah," and everyone went "ohhhh!" and "yeah!" and chimed in with enthusiasm. The choir leader said he'd order the sheet music. 

I said something about the lyrics being kind of inappropriate, and, conversation-wise, the floor dropped about 37 feet. I disappeared and vaporized as surely as that supposedly-holy Leonard Cohen lyric. I no longer existed because I wasn't chiming in, and besides, I was just being "negative" like I always was, spoiling things. (This was because I didn't want a six-voice version of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus, bawled off-key by people who couldn't sing a note. But the congregation thought it was simply wonderful.)

Hallelujah was never sung in my former church, for some reason, but I did see a very famous, viral video of a priest singing it at a wedding - and by the holy, all the lyrics were changed! Suddenly there was no one being tied to chairs, no haircuts, no one splashing around naked on a rooftop. It was all rendered extremely bland and weddingy. But what are the chances Leonard Cohen was ever consulted about this? And I am sure that when churches and wedding/baptism planners FINALLY get to the point of glancing at the lyrics and realize it's about an adulterous affair, they just get a pencil and start to work. "Oh, then, we can just sing our OWN version of it."

Last time I checked, that was extremely illegal. At very least, it's unethical, particularly for a church. Even some normal, ordinary songs like hymns can't be sung in church, at all, because of copyright. Not everything is in the public domain, and casually butchering a Leonard Cohen song is just not a good thing. 

I don't like this song, but I don't think it should be naively gutted just to sanitize it. Either go with the naked chick and the haircut, or forget about it.

Or maybe, instead of the David and Bathsheba thing, everyone should just go like this:

Blah blah blah blah blah blah-blah-blah

Blah blah blah blah blah blah-blah-blah

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, do you?


ADDENDUM. As usual, there is More To The Story.

A cold and broken Hallelujah: singing priest removed from YouTube
Wednesday, April 30, 2014

By Denise O'Donoghue
Reporter

The singing priest is no more - his video has disappeared from YouTube. Fr Ray Kelly’s rendition of Hallelujah was pulled following a copyright claim by Sony ATV Publishing.

Sony ATV Publishing own the rights to the original Leonard Cohen song.

The video had gained over 30m views on YouTube since it was uploaded to the website earlier this month, making Fr Kelly an instant star.

Fr Kelly recently revealed he was meeting with Sony to discuss a record deal.

Although the original video has been removed, other videos of his performance are still available on YouTube.

The Oldcastle parish priest surprised newly-weds Leah and Chris O’Kane with a personalised version of the Leonard Cohen song. He received a standing ovation before returning to the pulpit to deliver the final prayer.

Fr Kelly's fame led to him appearing on the Late Late Show and he is jetting off to New York to perform a concert on May 13 at The Town Hall on 123 West 43rd Street.

(I can't decide which of the Ten Commandments he broke here: Thou Shalt Not Steal, or Thou Shalt Not Write and Perform Sappy, Maudlin Lyrics to a Song by a Well-Respected, If Overly-Commercialized Poet? Or is it. . . Thou Shalt Not Gut a Popular Song and Casually Substitute Dreck of Your Own and Thus Become World-Famous Overnight, Not That You Care Because You're A Priest and Above All That Worldly Stuff? Moses would've needed a few extra tablets for that one.)

OH GOD! More verses. As I listened to a few of the recorded versions, I kept hearing extra stuff. It's kind of dirty, too, making the song even MORE inappropriate at weddings where nobody even thinks of sex, for Christ's sake (what is the matter with you?). Some versions have these verses, some don't. Did Leonard Cohen really write these, or was it that dirty old Irish priest? You know about priests, don't you? Dirty things.

Baby, I've been here before
I've seen this room and I've walked this floor (you know)
I used to live alone before I knew ya
And I've seen your flag on the marble arch
And love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah...

There was a time when you let me know
What's really going on below
But now you never show that to me, do ya?
But remember when I moved in you
And the holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah...

Maybe there's a God above
But all I've ever learned from love
Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya
And it's not a cry that you hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen the light
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah...
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah...
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah
Hallelujah, hallelujah

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NOW IT CAN BE TOLD: Bob Dylan wrote all of George Gershwin's songs!

 

Sooooooo! You think George Gershwin was an original, do you? You think he was the genius of that place, y’know, that alley with all those tin pans lying around? You think he wrote hundreds-a great songs like Mammy’s Little Baby Loves Shortnin’, Shortnin, and Mairsy-Dotes? WRONG. He stole from everybody, just like every legendary composer who ever lived.

This exposé will intersperse my unique revelations about Gershwin and his times with comments from that unassailable fountainhead of true lies, Wikipedia. The author uses it all the time to lend an aura of veracity to her completely fictitious essays and to casually bend facts to her own inclinations. Pay attention!

Gershwin was influenced by French composers of the early twentieth century. In turn Maurice Ravel was impressed with Gershwin's abilities, commenting, "Personally I find jazz most interesting: the rhythms, the way the melodies are handled, the melodies themselves. I have heard of George Gershwin's works and I find them intriguing.” The orchestrations in Gershwin's symphonic works often seem similar to those of Ravel; likewise, Ravel's two piano concertos evince an influence of Gershwin.

Gershwin asked to study with Ravel. When Ravel heard how much Gershwin earned, Ravel replied with words to the effect of, "You should give me lessons”. It was never made clear what kind of lessons he meant.  In fact, there is little evidence that Gershwin even understood French and had no idea what Ravel had just proposed. “To me,” he was quoted in the press, “it all sounds like Hinky Dinky Parley Voo.”

In spite of the fact that their attempt to meld their talents failed, the composers had something in common: they both died of brain tumors. This is proof that extended periods of composing causes the brain stem to harden into a hockey puck. Either that, or medical science is wrong and tumors are catching.

Some versions of this suspicious "you should give me lessons" story feature Igor Stravinsky rather than Ravel as the composer; however Stravinsky confirmed that he originally heard the story from Ravel, at one of those salons where they waved at each other and went, “Wooooo-hooooo!” Other accounts differ. In fact they differ so wildly that, as with most musical anecdotes,  it probably never happened at all.

Some claim that Gershwin was a time-traveller who showed up in Bob Dylan’s closet in 1962. Dylan's early faux-rockabilly style was a complete failure in Dinkytown,a very small pioneer settlement in Minnesota where none of the residents were more than 2 inches tall. At the time, Dylan was playing a pink plastic electric guitar with gold sparkles in it that he ordered out of the Sears catalogue.

“I want to study with you,” stated Gershwin, citing his complete lack of expertise in writing popular song.

“Hey man,” Dylan replied (though it is doubtful these are his exact words: citation required). "We can't study together. I already dropped outa high school."

“I don’t have any hits,” Gershwin claimed.

“I don’t either, man.  I'm still singin' Buddy Holly songs."

"Sing one for me, o legend of your times."

"Goes kinda like this.

I believe it to my soul you're the devil in nylon hose
I believe it to my soul you're the devil in nylon hose
For the harder I work the faster my money goes

Well I said shake, rattle and roll
I said shake rattle and roll
I said shake, rattle and roll
I said shake rattle and roll
Well you won't do right
To save your doggone soul

"I note that the tune is somewhat monochromatic."

"Say what?"

"It's all one note."

"Yeah, easier to remember, man. I have to write my changes on my sleeve."

"And the lyric has a certain primitive energy. After all, Cole Porter did allude to a glimpse of stocking."

"Well I ain't makin' a livin' at it yet. Too busy obliteratin' my middle-class upbringing and fabricatin' my image as bum ridin' the rails with Woody. But things are lookin' up. I’m screwin’ this girl named Baez and she's goin' places."

“Maybe I should’ve approached Schoenberg.”

“Yeah. He’s a good plumber, man.”

“Do you mean he plumbs the depth of the human soul?”

“Dig it.”

(This is a good example of how a completely inane remark can be twisted around to reflect future genius.)

But his collaboration with Dylan was not to be (sorry about the title, I changed my mind as I wrote this), nor did he ever work with that other guy whose name is so hard to spell. So he began to steal from other rock legends, notably Bruce Springsteen, whose remarks are not on record.

But the vandalism didn’t stop there. Gershwin's own Concerto in F was criticized for being related to the work of Claude Debussy, more so than to the expected jazz style. The comparison did not deter Gershwin from continuing to explore French styles. The title of An American in Paris reflects the very journey that he had consciously taken as a composer: "The opening part will be developed in typical French style, in the manner of Debussy and Les Six, though the tunes are original." Others claimed he used the term American to give the piece a veneer of cultural relevance while he sucked all the juices out of the French impressionists. Later Leslie Caron (French!) dumped a bucket of sexuality over the whole thing like whitewash, which is all people remember anyway.

Aside from the French influence, Gershwin was intrigued by the works of Alban Berg, Dmitri Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, and Arnold Schoenberg. He also ripped off Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Irving Berlin (his chief rival, who never learned to play the piano and was in fact tone-deaf).  He also asked Schoenberg for composition lessons. Schoenberg refused, saying "I would only make you a bad Schoenberg, and you're such a good Gershwin already." Gershwin’s reply was, “Awwwwwwwwwwwwwww.”  (This quote is similar to one credited to Maurice Ravel during Gershwin's 1928 visit to France – "Why be a second-rate Ravel, when you are a first-rate Gershwin?" He then hit him up for a loan.)

The  “first-rate Gershwin” remark which every composer in human history claimed to have uttered first has in fact been attributed to Gershwin himself, or perhaps his longtime walking companion Giorgg Greshvinn.

Meanwhile, Gershwin’s ghostwriter Mannie Maneschevitz turned out a semi-hit called Second-rate Gershwin, later made popular by Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl.

Gershwin’s dog was also named Gershwin. An Irish setter, the dog caused confusion on Tin Pan Alley, where he often drank from a tin pan, and in the salons of Paris where he had his fur foiled (he was actually a black lab). Gershwin was sometimes heard to exclaim, “Good boy, Gershwin!”, which was mistaken for arrogance on his part. Later one of his rivals George Greshwin wrote in the Henbane Times, “That new song Gershwin wrote is really a dog.”

Then again, there is Oscar Levant’s most brilliant, mind-blowing, searing quip ever, better than anything he ever blurted out on To Tell the Truth or Hollywood Squares: “An evening with George Gershwin sure is boring.”

Russian Joseph Schillinger's influence as Gershwin's teacher of composition (1932–1936) was substantial in providing him with a method of composition. (Author's note: Wikipedia wrote this atrocious sentence, not me.) There has been some disagreement about the nature of Schillinger's influence on Gershwin. After the posthumous success of Porgy and Bess, Schillinger claimed he had a large and direct influence in overseeing the creation of the opera; Ira completely denied that his brother had any such assistance for this work. A third account of Gershwin's musical relationship with his teacher was written by Gershwin's close friend Vernon Duke, also a Schillinger student, in an article for the Musical Quarterly. (And so on, and so on, and so on. Time for a new paragraph.)

Porgy and Bess caused controversy in 1936 when it was retitled The Watermelon Review. Featuring only white actors in blackface, it was raided and permanently closed by the police when the burnt cork melted off the actors’ faces, revealing the shocking fact that white people had appeared in a black opera. Gershwin’s suggestion that the opera be restaged with black actors was met with stunned silence. A modest revival featuring Al Jolson playing all the characters (singing such tunes as Mammy, You is my Woman Now and Sum-sum-summertime) resulted in a record number of rotten tomatoes being thrown at the stage, to a possible depth of 3 feet.  The star of the very first talking picture The Jazz Singer was quoted as saying, “This was another Jolson triumph”, before going off to make a movie called The Jazz Singer II: Yes, It’s Crap, but It’s Got Sound.

During another time-travel episode in 1967, Rolling Stone magazine attempted to analyze Gershwin’s plagiarism but quit after page 3 because they couldn’t get a good cover photo. Oscar Levant kept standing in front of him.

What set Gershwin apart, aside from his overbite, his strange-looking skin rash and a propensity for screaming in the street, was his ability to manipulate forms of music into his own unique voice. He took the jazz he discovered on Tin Pan Alley into the mainstream by splicing its rhythms and tonality with that of the popular songs of his era. In musical circles, this is known as “stealing”.

Although George Gershwin would continually make grand statements about his music, he believed that "true music must reflect the thought and aspirations of the people and time. My people are Americans. My time is today.” Today didn’t last very long because his brain exploded 15 minutes later. He also dissed Toscanini for pretending not to have heard Rhapsody in Blue. “I can’t believe it,” Gershwin remarked. “He must have stuck bubblegum in his ears.” This statement appears in Bartlett’s Quotations on page 96 (citation needed: this whole article is complete bullshit!).

CODA. As usual, screwing around with images is both more fun than writing, and much more time-consuming. Thinking about Buddy Holly and his black-framed glasses, the kind that are once more coming into fashion, I wondered how Gershwin would look with Dylan's eyes, and vice-versa. The results were unsettling.

Of course I never got a perfect match because their facial shape is so different, but what struck me is that the eyes were almost interchangeable in the quality of their gaze, their intensity, focus, and almost scary self-possession. Nothing has ever thrown Bob Dylan, not even being booed for ten years for singing Sunday School songs, and Gershwin similarly knew he was great stuff and that no one could equal him.

Gershwin was tragically cut down at 38, and everyone assumes he would have gone right on pouring out hit tunes and classic operas and things. Such might not have been the case. He may well have been a sort of Chaplin figure, a sad elder statesman unable to adapt to dramatically changing times. Fascinatin' Rhythm wouldn't play well even in the era of Vic Damone and the Rat Pack, let alone today. The people who listen to Gershwin now are mainly senior citizens, or musicologists making yet another one of those dreary PBS specials in which they dust off the progeny of the progeny of somebody famous in the 1920s. Plus a few high school students being required to perform the popular music of a century ago just for extra band credits.

Dylan has just hung on by his teeth, tough as an old lizard, his voice completely shot, but unlike 95% of other legends he's a shape-shifter and won't stick to any particular era. Lots of people still associate him with Blowin' in the Wind and "protest songs", but real fans (and I am not one of them: I gave up after Desire/Blood on the Tracks, which I still think would've made a great double album) appreciate the fact that he is still completely unpredictable. He wins tons of awards now, lifetime achievement things, and each medal slung around his neck seems more like an albatross. But hey. . . there's always the Christmas album.

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Teetering on the brink

After writing my yearbook-nostalgia piece about 1966, I had to do a little digging about the songs that were popular back then.

Ye gods and little fishes! What happened? How could there be such an explosion of passion and talent and innovation, cheek-by-jowl with the most inane slop?

I can't name them all here, but I went on the Billboard Top 100 for '66 and just pulled out a few, not randomly but because they caught my eye and/or I liked/remembered/hated them.

There was an idiotic thing called 96 Tears by ? and the Mysterians. The DJs on CKLW Detroit ("Windsor and Detroit know/It's Radio Eight-oh!"), which we all slavishly listened to every day, must've had a bit of trouble with that one. Then there was Red Rubber Ball by a band called The Cyrkle, who might as well have named themselves The Oblivions.

The Lovin' Spoonful, who were many-hit wonders and (at their best) superb, scored a couple of big ones: Summer in the City (which still evokes for me those sweaty, cicada-chanting days in Chatham when I slept over at Shawne Aitken's house and played Archie and Veronica. Never mind) and a real gem called Did You Ever Have to Make Up your Mind.


Rumor has it that this was based on the bees-buzzing-around-honey effect Joan and Mimi Baez seemed to have on men during the height of the folk craze, and Richard Farina's big dilemma: which one to suck up to? (He finally chose Mimi before dying in a motorcycle accident a couple of years later.) Even Bob Dylan went through the "make up your mind" bit before shunning both of them. Their father Albert Baez must have been relieved.

Oh, and the Mamas and the Papas, laid-back but somehow completely focused, with their voices so perfectly meshed that they sometimes created alarming, spinning overtones in the studio that whirled like little tornados above everyone's head. This seldom happens except with those rare operatic sopranos whose high notes can shatter glass.


They put out Monday Monday that year, the song that makes absolutely no sense when the lyrics are analyzed ("so good to me"? The rest of the song vilifies it.) The rest of the group didn't even want to do it, it sounded so lame: a day of the week? Later they came out with one of their most brilliant '60s anthems, California Dreamin'. (My personal fave is Twelve Thirty, a haunting memoir of the life of a young prostitute. Their heyday was so short that this must have followed soon after.)

Oh, and. Donovan was getting big then, with Sunshine Superman. This one reminds me of the smell of oil paints. Yes. Shawne and I used to do paint-by-numbers, as well as stroll over to the park where perverts were known to hang out. Associations are weird. Last Train to Clarksville reminds me of peanuts. Paperback Writer is hoppity as a hot hen. 

Then there's Nowhere Man. What had happened to the Beatles, anyway? All their songs were getting so melancholy. We didn't know it, but it was the beginning of a gathering storm.

Oh, there are tons of others, Wild Thing, Good Vibrations, Rainy Day Women #12 and 35: but as good as these sounded then, I can't get into them now. I loved Walk Away Renee and found this strangely beautiful video, I found Summer in the City badly lipsynched on one of those teen shows (where no one ever performed life). I am a little afraid to look up Twelve Thirty or Ruby Tuesday (which came later, and which for some reason tear my guts out).

Noel Coward or some snoot like that once said, "Amazing how potent cheap music can be." I'd reverse that. Those 45 rpms only cost a couple of bucks back then. Amazing how cheap potent music can be.


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