Sunday Pages: "Hallelujah"

A song by Leonard Cohen

Dear Reader,

I woke up Thursday morning at 4:30 am and couldn’t fall back asleep. So I got up, and made coffee, and sat at the laptop, and banged out most of Friday’s “Purple Haze” piece. When I finished, it was a little after six—still enough time to catch some shut-eye before work.

But I couldn’t sleep. Not wanting to disturb my wife, I lay on the bed in my son’s vacant room, scrolling through Spotify to figure out what to play to help me relax. Earlier in the week, Rufus Wainwright became the latest musician to call out Trump for playing one of his songs at a MAGA hate-rally—in his case, a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” I love that song, but I hadn’t heard Wainwright’s rendition, so I put it on. Then I listened to John Cale’s version, then Jeff Buckley’s. As I listened, I found myself crying. And I’m still not exactly sure why.

“Hallelujah” has a long, tortuous, and fascinating history—so much so that the journalist and rock critic Alan Light was able to write a whole book about it: The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of “Hallelujah.” The original recording suffers from poor musical arrangement and Cohen’s low, unlovely singing voice that struggles to stay in tune. Numerous artists, including Cale and Buckley, shaped the song into what it’s become: aural catharsis, the soundtrack of emotional release.

We have proof of concept. On November 12, 2016, five days after Cohen died and four days after the ill-fated Kremlin-boosted election, Saturday Night Live opened with Kate McKinnon, dressed up as Hillary Clinton, sitting at a grand piano and playing a three-verse rendition of “Hallelujah.” It was not at all funny and was not meant to be. Instead, it was cathartic. And catharsis is what those of us who were collectively traumatized required.

Almost eight full years later, I lay on the bed weeping, and decided that for “Sunday Pages” this week, I would try and analyze Cohen’s obscure and allusive lyrics. I’ve been mulling this for three days, and I still can’t tell you definitively what the song is about—probably because, like all great poetry, “Hallelujah” is about a lot of different things, is open to myriad interpretations.

We may as well start with McKinnon’s take on it, related in this excerpt from Light’s book that ran at Esquire. She is talking here about the seventh and final verse, which is omitted in some popular arrangements of the song, and was therefore new to her as she rehearsed for the cold open in 2016:

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.

As Light writes:

“I’d always understood ‘Hallelujah’ in the context of a romantic relationship, as had most of us,” said McKinnon. “And then this verse—in this moment when it was so emotional for everyone in the country, when no matter what side you were on, it was a moment of surprise and high-octane emotion—I suddenly understood it in a new light. It’s about love, and how love is a slog but it’s worth it.”

She started to cry before she continued. “I suddenly understood it as, like, the love of this idea that is America. That all people are created equal, and that’s the most beautiful idea in the world, but the execution has been long and tough and we’re still just trying to get it right. But that it’s worth it, and that it will always be worth it.”

That is a lovely, smart, and valid interpretation of the song. But it is almost certainly not what Cohen, who is Canadian, had in mind when he wrote it. That McKinnon was able to not only extract that meaning from the lyrics, but convey it convincingly to the millions of us watching, speaks to the song’s poetical potency.

Like the Hebrew Bible to which its first two verses allude, “Hallelujah” contains multitudes. The song is a mad jumble of polarities: holy/broken, love/lust, spiritual/mundane, above/below, and so on. The push and pull of extremes is established with elegant subtlety in the song’s wonderfully cryptic opening lines:

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?

The word secret, when sung, sounds like sacred. I’ve heard renditions of it where the word sacred is deliberately used instead. I can only guess at what the secret/sacred chord might be—more on that in a minute—but I know its opposite. That would be the tritone, the so-called Devil’s Chord, the Diabolus in musica: three whole tones between notes; a flattened fifth. You can hear an example of this discordant interval in the opening notes of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” Legend has it that use of the tritone in musical composition was a punishable offense in the Middle Ages, because the dissonance was not pleasing to God.

The other polarity established in those lines is the conflict between lovers of music, like the narrator, and those who don’t care for it. Cohen’s use of you during the seven verses is inconsistent, which makes the lyrics more challenging to analyze, but most of the time, it feels like he’s addressing an old lover who has jilted him. (Note: I’m going to assign Cohen’s “he/him” pronouns to the narrator, because he is a man, and because the lines seem to express male grievance, but of course “she/her” or “they/their” would also work.)

Implicitly, we are told that the “secret chord” is a C major: C-E-G. He explains it in song, singing about the chord progression as he plays through it. In the key of C major, the “fourth” is F, the “fifth” is G, and the relative minor—what he calls the “minor fall”—is A minor, which key he briefly modulates into with his use of an E7 chord on the word baffled:

Well it goes like this: The fourth, the fifth,
The minor fall, the major lift—
The baffled king composing Hallelujah.

David, the “baffled king,” is who delivered us music, as a way to give thanks to God. Hallelujah derives directly from the Hebrew hallĕlūyāh: A Hallel is a prayer of thanksgiving, and Yāh is Yahweh. In the first verse, we see in David’s creative work humanity at its most sublime, art in its highest form.

But in the second verse, things take a dark turn. Cohen digs deep into 2 Samuel and Judges, conflating David and Samson. The woman “bathing on the roof” is Bathsheba, whom the Bible tells us was observed by David, ogled by David, brought to David by his underlings, and either seduced by David or raped by David (the story is vague, but it’s most likely the latter), impregnated by David, and then wed to David, after he conspires to have her husband, Uriah, killed in battle to cover up his sin.

Poor Bathsheba is powerless before the mighty king, but in her relationship with Samson, a sort of Biblical Superman, Delilah holds all the power. She coaxes from him the secret of his strength—his long hair—she ties him up, and she has his braids cut off, to free her people from his domination (and also to make bank from the Philistines who paid her for the information). That Samson, the great Israelite hero, is subdued, blinded, and enslaved in Gaza City, whose leaders he subsequently crushes under the weight of a fallen building, is also eerily relevant to the news of the day.

If the story of David and Bathsheba is intensely, uglily human and therefore believable, the tale of Samson and Delilah is both fantastical and highly erotic, bordering on Sade-infused bondage smut. Cohen puts these Biblical allusions in a supercharged sexual-fantasy blender, and the “Hallelujah” drawn from his lips is equivalent to the noises Meg Ryan makes in the diner scene in When Harry Met Sally:

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

Cohen’s lyrics often contrast the grandiose and broad with the intimate and personal. In “Everybody Knows,” for example, he begins with big sweeping assertions about the fucked up state of things—Everybody knows that the dice are loaded / Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed / Everybody knows the war is over / Everybody knows the good guys lost—before turning the lens around, putting himself under the microscope, and revealing the real reason why he thinks everything sucks, to heartbreaking effect:

Everybody knows that you love me, baby.
Everybody knows that you really do.
Everybody knows that you've been faithful—
Oh, give or take a night or two.
Everybody knows you’ve been discreet,
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes.
Everybody knows.

Similarly, “First We Take Manhattan” sounds like the interior monologue of an ideological Soviet double agent, someone from The Americans, until the end, when he reveals more personal details:

Ah, remember me, I used to live for music.
Remember me, I brought your groceries in.
Well, it’s Father’s Day, and everybody’s wounded.
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

In the same vein, the next two verses of “Hallelujah” move abruptly from the palaces of mythological heroes who died eight thousand years ago to a modern-day domestic scene set in an intimate apartment the narrator shares with his lover:

Baby I’ve been here before.
I’ve seen this room, and I’ve walked this floor.
I used to live alone before I knew you.

The heart of the song, I think, is contained in the second half of the verse:

I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch—
Our love is not a victory march.
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.

That’s the part that made me cry. Some of my emotional response derives from the beautiful poetical phrasing of the last line: It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah. No one talks like that. We would say “it’s a cold, broken” or “it’s a cold and broken.” The second “it’s a” elevates the language to poetry.

The contradictory idea of a “broken Hallelujah” is echoed in the fifth verse. . .

Maybe there’s a God above,
But all I’ve ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at somebody who outdrew you.
It’s not a cry that you can hear at night,
It’s not someone who has seen the light.
It’s a cold and a broken Hallelujah.

. . . and then modified slightly in verse #6:

There’s a blaze of light in every word,
It doesn’t matter which you heard—
The holy or the broken Hallelujah.

Which hallelujah are we listening to—the holy one or the broken one? Why does the narrator equate love with coldness and breaking? Is his use of the image of a flag hanging down from an arch—something the Romans did to celebrate great military victories—meant to suggest that love is a zero sum game, a matter of conquest and occupation? That love, as Pat Benatar told us 40 years ago, is indeed a battlefield?

More importantly: How can a hallelujah be broken?

The narrator’s internal conflict seems to resolve itself in the seventh and final verse—the one that so moved Kate McKinnon:

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.

We have now come full circle, with another reference to the Lord—this time, specifically, the Lord of Song. There is also a note of defiance, as our narrator stands in judgment before the Divine. He is finally reconciled with himself. He accepts his failures and his flaws. And the only thing he is compelled to say to God is that single, mellifluous word—the password, perhaps, to eternal salvation.

So we must ask again: what is hallelujah?

Hallelujah is an expression of gratitude. We can’t express gratitude—true gratitude—unless we have empathy. We can’t give thanks—true thanks—unless we are capable of love for our fellow humans. We can’t feel grateful for all the good in the world—and, despite the headlines, there is so much good in the world—if we haven’t also had to reckon with the bad.

Gratitude is the acceptance of the reality that we were, that we are, that we always will be, beholden to other people: that we are vulnerable, that we are needy, that we are fearful, that we are—aha!—broken. Donald Trump’s congenital inability to feel or express gratitude is what makes him so abhorrent. All the other awful things about him flow from that gaping deficiency of soul. We might say that, for all his swaying on stage lately to songs from his odd playlist, he doesn’t really care for music, does he?

Eight years after McKinnon’s raw, vulnerable, beautiful, cathartic performance on SNL—when the hallelujah in question was undoubtedly of the broken variety—we are ready for its other, higher, holy form. We eagerly await a shift in polarity. There is no better way to express the profound gratitude we will feel nine days from now that in that single, powerful, ancient word—perhaps the oldest one in the English language.

Hallelujah,
Hallelujah,
Hallelujah,
Hallelujah.

Speak it into existence.

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ICYMI

We broadcast The Five 8 live from my mom’s basement—and she made a special appearance:

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Photo credit: “Bathsheba at the Bath,” Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1889.