Rant: Rewriting "Hallelujah" is just wrong
At least five friends and acquaintances have posted a viral video of a priest officiating at a wedding ceremony in Ireland. Father Ray Kelly surprised the couple, Chris and Leah O'Kane, with a version of Leonard Cohen's much-loved (and covered) "Hallelujah".
Father Kelly has a pleasing tenor; the song obviously was a showstopper. But Father sang new words, substituting the most banal lyrics imaginable in place of the keening original.
Cohen's lyrics read, in part:
"Maybe there’s a God above
But all I’ve ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
It’s not a cry you can hear at night
It’s not somebody who has seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.."
In only one stanza, Cohen limns anguish, eros and weariness, a hard road both forward and back.
I went a bit wild when I heard Father Kelly sing, instead:
"We join together here today
To help some people on their way
As Leah and Chris start their life together
And now they've reached their special day
We've come to help them celebrate
And show them how much we all love them to you..."
As my father would say, Christ on a cracker! This is wrong for so many reasons I have to get my blood pressure down before I can enumerate them.
First, you don't mess with an artist's work, especially one who is still performing, holding the copyright and writing a zillion percent better than one Lucy Pitts-O'Connor, who wrote the lyrics when she was ten, for her godmother's wedding.
If you are going to mess with the lyrics, think twice unless you can bend them into a parodic and/or eccentric mind-eff (think Tim Minchin), which is unlikely if you have spent the last 25 years in a cassock. Otherwise, respect the integrity of the work.
KD Lang did it, Jeff Buckley did it, Matthew Schuyler on "The Voice" did it, Jon Bon Jovi (surprisingly moving) did it, even freaking Celine Dion represented when she crashed the Canadian Tenor's performance on Oprah.
As several persons who received this rant in person said, But, Father didn't mean any harm! He was just trying to do something nice! And the couple loved it!
I too think he had the best intentions. However, I wonder what would happen if a couple approached their friendly singing pastor and said, "You know "Ave Maria"? Great chord progression, but the lyrics are a buzzkill. We'll make it about the wedding, not Mary. I've put in our names! Waddya say, Father?"
Cohen wrote seventy verses over three years, and distilled two full notebooks into an anthem of anguish and hope.
He has said,"I feel myself a very minor writer. I've taken a certain territory, and I've tried to maintain it and administrate it with the very best of my capacities. And I will continue to administrate this tiny territory until I'm too weak to do it. But I understand where this territory is."
Leonard Cohen, performing "Hallelujah" live:
Father Kelly has a pleasing tenor; the song obviously was a showstopper. But Father sang new words, substituting the most banal lyrics imaginable in place of the keening original.
Cohen's lyrics read, in part:
"Maybe there’s a God above
But all I’ve ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
It’s not a cry you can hear at night
It’s not somebody who has seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.."
In only one stanza, Cohen limns anguish, eros and weariness, a hard road both forward and back.
I went a bit wild when I heard Father Kelly sing, instead:
"We join together here today
To help some people on their way
As Leah and Chris start their life together
And now they've reached their special day
We've come to help them celebrate
And show them how much we all love them to you..."
As my father would say, Christ on a cracker! This is wrong for so many reasons I have to get my blood pressure down before I can enumerate them.
First, you don't mess with an artist's work, especially one who is still performing, holding the copyright and writing a zillion percent better than one Lucy Pitts-O'Connor, who wrote the lyrics when she was ten, for her godmother's wedding.
If you are going to mess with the lyrics, think twice unless you can bend them into a parodic and/or eccentric mind-eff (think Tim Minchin), which is unlikely if you have spent the last 25 years in a cassock. Otherwise, respect the integrity of the work.
KD Lang did it, Jeff Buckley did it, Matthew Schuyler on "The Voice" did it, Jon Bon Jovi (surprisingly moving) did it, even freaking Celine Dion represented when she crashed the Canadian Tenor's performance on Oprah.
As several persons who received this rant in person said, But, Father didn't mean any harm! He was just trying to do something nice! And the couple loved it!
I too think he had the best intentions. However, I wonder what would happen if a couple approached their friendly singing pastor and said, "You know "Ave Maria"? Great chord progression, but the lyrics are a buzzkill. We'll make it about the wedding, not Mary. I've put in our names! Waddya say, Father?"
Cohen wrote seventy verses over three years, and distilled two full notebooks into an anthem of anguish and hope. He has said,"I feel myself a very minor writer. I've taken a certain territory, and I've tried to maintain it and administrate it with the very best of my capacities. And I will continue to administrate this tiny territory until I'm too weak to do it. But I understand where this territory is."
Leonard Cohen, performing "Hallelujah" live:
Comments
Susan: How people like the new version is a matter of taste (and I too find this cringeworthy), but what disturbs me more is the alteration to an artist's work. I do make a distinction for parody (as does copyright law) but I doubt that was the purpose. "
It is hauntingly beautiful.
Shame on that priest!9969688 222
I would see a bit of difference in Sandy casually setting new lyrics to known music in a casual setting, not a public one.
But to make this part of a wedding ceremony, a very important event--as a surprise---just seems very wrong to me.
And I agree that copyrighted material should be respected with the possible exception of being in your own home (or similar setting) and very casually offering up new lyrics---IF you think the recipients would enjoy that sort of thing.
Cohen's song has become a musical portrayal of modern secular society - doubting, anguish, and loss, finalized by the life-affirming Hallelujah in spite of it all.
Completely agree with you Susan. A wedding ceremony is so personal to the couple. I would have been cringing if I were there.
I don't mind the priest changing the lyrics though. I don't feel strongly about the song so it doesn't bother me.
And the disregard for an artist's intention seems so stretch a commandment or two out of whack as well. I sing Hallelujah to your rant!
Leonard can sue the priest if he wants.
Wendy
"For to articulate sweet sounds together/ is to work harder than all these, and yet/ be thought an idler by the noisy set/ of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen/ the martyrs call the world"
A poem or song is always open to interpretation. Part of what makes the great ones, like this song, great is that they can mean different things to different people. But re-writing is NOT interpretation. It is violation.
Thanks, too, for the links to the remarkable K.D. Laing and others. I would add Rufus Wainwright who, with his strange reedy voice, sings it like a lost boy.
C.
Constance
Susan: Few of us have the talent to write original music for a humourous or sentimental private occasion, so I could live with that. I've participated in a few nutty "Talent Nights" where we did just that.
June: You do not have to feel one way or another about the song to consider that the performance was an appropriation of an artist's work which significantly distorted its tone, intent and message.
materfamilias: I would not defend him but •hope• for the sake of his ministry he was simply thoughtless.
Araminta: Some texts are tampered with in the name of inclusion, and I too wish they were not. But that was not the intent here; it was to appropriate the melody and use it to commemorate an occasion, in the most banal way possible.
Northmoon: Disney is (usually) not appropriating the work of a living renowned artist, much as I dislike that too. Litigation, a punitive approach, may not be Cohen's philosophical cup of tea; however, he has said in interviews that he has not been vigilant enough about the use of his work by others.
Wendy: Thanks; part of it is that Cohen's work does mean a lot to me. However, I also in principle do not like the appropriation of an artist's work.
C.: There are many interpretations of the song but with the exception of Il Divo's version in Italian) I cannot find another example of revised lyrics.
Leonard Cohen said in an interview I read to write this post that the song was incredibly difficult to write; he said, "And I remember being on the floor, on the carpet in my underwear, banging my head on the floor and saying, 'I can't finish this song.'"
LPC and Constance: The issue is not the song itself but the violation of artistic integrity, an issue more far-reaching than a single song.
All: A book by Alan Light has just come out on the song, Alan Light, "The Holy Or The Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley And The Unlikely Ascent Of Hallelujah".
Here is a nice little clip from the BBC in which the author comments:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20778621
Fr. Kelly was using lyrics written by a young woman (now 14.. I'll give her the benefit of the doubt that, at 10, she never thought of such issues.
I find various commenters' judgment that Cohen would not be upset to be presumptive, as his permission was not sought.
Neither faith or ethnicity justify taking an artist's chef d'oeuvre and rendering it unrecognizable save for the melody.
I would gave a lot to hear him sing the actual verse:
"Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty in 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"
Hugo descendants speak out: http://tinyurl.com/HugoHunchback1
http://tinyurl.com/HugoHunchback2
It is disrespectful and unjust to take one person's work (without permission) and alter the tone so that it in pubic performance it delivers an entirely different message, regardless of whether you find the altered song "sweet".
Mme: Yes it is a travesty. And, whether the revision is sweet or stomach-turning (depending on your aesthetics, the act itself is a transgression against the artist.
lagatts: There are many, many examples of appropriation and revision out there; artists now dead or whose copyright protection has lapsed are especially prone to such raiding.
I'm guessing couples in many locales think this version is "sweet" and are asking for its inclusion at their weddings.
The ability of YouTube to disseminate such material changes my level of concern.
Cohen said, in an interview, "If you're going to think of yourself in this game, or in this tradition, and you start getting a swelled head about it, then you've really got to think about who you're talking about. You're not just talking about Randy Newman, who's fine, or Bob Dylan, who's sublime, you're talking about King David, Homer, Dante, Milton, Wordsworth, you're talking about the embodiment of our highest possibility. So I don't think it's particularly modest or virtuous to think of oneself as a minor poet."
Father Kelly does not seem aware of that tradition when he chose to use rewritten lyrics.