I wasn’t there, so this is a little once removed, but from what I saw on TV something of a standout moment at the bushfire memorial service yesterday in Melbourne was a massed choir reading of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.
First thought was ‘Can’t they leave that song alone!’, but there’s more. How did this admittedly very fetching ditty become some sort of multi-porpose emo-anthem? Has any one actually listened to the words? Are events like this memorial service so detached, so superficial, so glib, that anything will do so long as it sort of hums right? Is it just about some sort of warm, but ultimately meaning-stripped inner glow?.
I mean look at the text:
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
HallelujahYour 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 HallelujahBaby I have been here before
I know this room, I’ve walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you.
I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch
Love is not a victory march
It’s a cold and it’s a broken HallelujahHallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, HallelujahThere was a time you let me know
What’s really going on below
But now you never show it to me, do you?
And remember when I moved in you
The holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was HallelujahHallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, 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 you?
There’s a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken HallelujahHallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, 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 you
And even though
It all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
What has that got to do with anything other than Leonard’s love life? If the song choice was that hollow, was does that say about the other sympathetic mouthings?
Good grief. Nothing much means nothing much.
9 Comments
Just another shallow, insincere, grossly offensive exercise in disaster-porn. Yes we grieve, yes we burned, but no we don’t need Ozzie, ozzie, ozzie Oink, oink, oink, as one cheer woman put it and we don’t need St Pontificus Platitudinous Ruddiness doing all the concerned camera angles. Who choreographed this? What riding instructions were given to the television networks and by whom? C’mon Crikey, dig, no one else will.
Amen to that, JG. For once I agree with you 100%. I’m glad I’m not the only one who found ‘Hallelujah’ disturbingly incongruous in this context. When I read it in the program I actually thought it meant Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, which wouldn’t have been any less appropriate.
Are you paid on a per-comment basis, brother JG? If so I’m alert and alarmed.
Trust Jonathon to be in tune with my humbug detecting antenna. How can so many be oblivious to this pap we are served up? Predictable, mind-numbing opiates for the masses, instead of addressing the real issues and causes.
I, like Jonathon, increasingly appear to belong to a past generation that could see through the spin instead of willingly subscribing to empty platitudes.
Keep on fiddling while the country burns.
Well said JG.
I’d actually forgotten about the “National day of emoting” until I casually turned on the TV and discovered that all 5 TV channels had been hijacked for a simulcast.
I was so outraged, that I turned off the TV and (fortunately) missed the entire thing.
Sounds like I made the right decision.
Right on, JG. And here’s another thing… choirs give me the absolute shits. They’re brilliant at big, brassy religious music – you know, hymns and gospel. Take your pick of the requiems for proof of how spine-tinglingly good they can be.
But a lot of musical director types use choirs as a lazy shortcut: if it’s sung by a choir, people must assume it’s important, emotive, sacred. Not when they’re murdering a minimalist Leonard Cohen song that sounded all the better when Jeff Buckley stripped it down to nothing but guitar and a single, sincere voice.
(Advertisers use the same choir = emotive shortcut with equally poor taste. I’m look at YOU, Qantas!)
But did you ever expect the bushfire memorial to be anything but meaningless, populist farce?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and marched upon by trite politicians to the music of tabloid press. In my opinion the disaster porn craze began with former GG Bill Deane going to Switzerland to attend a memorial to some youngsters lost in a flashflood. In his inimitable style he did a great job and received a good deal of praise in the press and on TV.
This was all too much for John Howard and his spin doctors who commandeered every subsequent photo op that arose, and even attempted to manufacture events (Kerry Packer State Funeral!!!) when publicity was needed. No GG was allowed to show their face again. The tabloid media loved it. Emotion on tap, publicised and paid for by the Government. How good does it get?
Now no PM or Premier would dare not to play the tabloid game. Imagine the uproar if Rudd or Brumby had told the truth a couple of weeks back and said that while they sympathised with the victims and would do all they could to alleviate their suffering, in the best interests of the fire fighting and recovery efforts they would stay out of the way and allow the emergency services and others to allocate all their resources to the task at hand.
Now we have almost an industry kicking into gear to choreograph the commemoration of these events.
Glad I wasn’t the only one who cringed. There are different versions of the lyrics, but they’re all about sex. Perhaps more poetically put than ‘Insert tab B in slot A’, but it’s still about bonking.
The ABC had some sort of fire special in the days afterwards (it might even have been the 7.30 report, or in place of it) and they advertised it with I think Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah, and specifically the verse that ends:
“And remember when I moved in you
The holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah.”
which, fairly obviously, is nostalgia for a particularly nice bonk with an ex, and anyone who can’t see that is an idiot.
Loved it.
How can anyone take seriously a nation of small-minded people whose battle song is that of the pig? Oi, oi, oi. Even worse, when pronounced by the Oz accent, it becomes, sort of uhi, uhi, uhi (the aitch is silent please. And it isn’t spelled, or pronounced haitch as so many Aussies would have the rest of us believe).
As for the media and it’s coverage of the aftermath of the bushfires. Tawdry, whingeing, little Aussie Battler crap, the stuff which always used to be dished out by John Howard. And I’m only going on what was the ABC’s coverage. I’d be prepared to take on the world knowing the little Aussie battler whinge would beat any other nation’s whinge.