DECODING HALLELUJAH
Originally published in Open Book Toronto when I was Writer in Residence.
Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah” was at first a little-known cut on his 1988 album Various Positions. Since then, it has spread like a musical virus, now having been covered by over 200 artists, and gained the coveted Christmas Number One spot in the UK through the X-Factor's Alexandra Burke version. It's become for singers what Everest is for climbers -- everybody wants to attempt it. kd lang scaled this peak again at the Vancouver Olympics opening ceremonies.
I’m sure, therefore, that you’ve heard the song, and probably even have a favourite version (mine are John Cale’s , the very first cover, and kd lang’s, but Jeff Buckley fans are adamant about his rendition). Cale, a charter member of the original Velvet Underground, edited what is now the most-heard version by selecting lines from 15 pages of lyrics that the author sent him. Cohen often sang different versions in performance, adding and dropping stanzas as the mood took him. Other covers have been issued by a good slice of rock music’s royalty from Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and Bono to Canadians Rufus Wainwright and Allison Crowe. Maybe you’ve come to agree with its creator that the song is ready for a rest from public airing.
Obviously, to achieve such popularity, it must have a strong melody, but what about its lyrics? My impression is that many who love the song don’t really register some of its darker and more mystical suggestions, focusing instead on the “Hallelujah” chorus as evidence that the song is a celebration of good things in life. Cohen – as anyone who has read his poetry or novels can attest – is never that simple.
Like many Cohen songs, “Hallelujah” mixes the Bible (the stories of David and Bathsheeba, and Samson and Delilah, are alluded to) with personal and erotic imagery (parts of the song refer to stages in a love relationship and differences between the partners -- "but you don't really care for music, do ya?"). There is a conceptual cleverness in the lines about how the song goes ("a fourth, a fifth, a minor fall, a major lift"), because they echo the chord sequence for those lines C-F-G-A minor-F). But what about the lines about Samson: (“She broke your throne, she cut your hair / And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah”) or what kind of oral praise this is (“And it is not somebody who has seen the light/ It's a cold and it is a broken Hallelujah”)? Why laud such moments of pain or vulnerability?
In lines widely quoted from another of his songs, “Anthem”, Cohen writes “Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in.” The crack and light imagery, as my friend Kenneth Sherman once pointed out in a review of Adele Wiseman’s novel Crackpot, is a reference to a passage written by the Kabbalist and philosopher Isaac Luria, about an event in the creation of the world: “the Vessel, unable to contain the Holy Radiance, burst and its shards, permeated with sparks of the Divine, scattered through the Universe.”
I think the spiritual depth that is so compelling in “Hallelujah” comes from this perception. Unlike the easy dialectic of sappy sentiments like “always look on the bright side” or “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, the crack and the Light are one and the same thing. The pain and imperfections of this world are just as worthy of praise as a new baby, a new love or a rainbow over a mountain. Love is not a victory march, but a willingness to stay with someone whatever happens. In the story of Job, which hallelujah would have meant more to his creator: the one uttered when he was experiencing prosperity and health, or the broken one uttered as he surveyed his boils?
If it is the role of poets and artists to express how it feels to be human in their particular time and physical self, then Cohen with his usual honesty is telling listeners that we need to attend to everything that we experience, not mentally blanking out the harder lessons. Otherwise we will never learn from them, and we will keep being unable to reassemble our personal vessels of light in the time given to us. From being born, to making love, to dying, we have to work with our vessels, and all the cracks they carry.
“But remember when I moved in you,
And the Holy Ghost was moving too,
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah…”