This is a brilliant piece of music criticism — I mean it, especially for those who attempt to sanctify love/heartbreak by looking at it via power relations — but the word I wish he’d find is “standard.”
It’s one of those brilliant terms whose secondary meanings also make at least some sense:
If you, like me, discovered “Hallelujah” by listening to it alone and didn’t think anyone else knew it until you heard the (better-than-usually-reputed) Rufus Wainwright version in the middle of Shrek–or if you’ve ever heard anyone call the song “their favorite” because “it’s so beautiful” (my favorite variation on this is “It’s so pretty that it always makes me happy”)–you know what it is to pull out the One True Version, waving your trump card like a flag.
I’m sure listening to even half of the dozen cover versions the author list must feel like watching the qualifying round of the pole-vault finals: can you get your ankle over the heartbreak?
And as for the usual meaning: well, it goes both ways. I’ve certainly sung this in late-night singalong chorus, though any of us with an ounce of sense felt at least a little shame for singing “Hallelujah” as if it were a melody rather than a heartbreak. But the more interesting way goes through a passage in On Beauty by Zadie Smith, which really you ought to read all of (it spans pp. 173-4) but which sums up what I mean with this:
When, on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Jerome had played his parents an ethereal, far more beautiful version of “Halleluiah” by a kid called Buckley, Kiki had thought yes, that’s right, our memories are getting more beautiful and less real every day.
Old songs bring nostalgia, which sounds like the drug it is. Standards separate that which endures in a song from the circumstance of a given recording, and in doing so allow the listener to measure herself by them as well.
(As much as I’m in favor of covering the hell out of standards, though, I must ask that if you have a brilliant idea you leave someone with some talent to pull it off. This had the potential to be the saddest thing I’ve heard all week; as it was, but the impression is so bad that it becomes just a frustratingly nasal version of the song. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!)
Grumpy rockist Noah says: Don’t fuck with Leonard Cohen. Just don’t do it. He’ll fucking knife you. His version IS the best. It is the only one that puts defiance into the chorus, so far as I know. Don’t fuck with him.
Caveat: Elton John singing “I’m Your Man” shouldn’t be missed, though it couldn’t qualify as an improvement. Perhaps Antony and the Johnsons singing “If It Be Your Will” is better, though 20 years of training reminds me that the cover is never better than the original, man.
“Couldn’t qualify as an improvement?” What IS that thing at the beginning of the original, anyway? A Casio keyboard? A synth accordion? Is this a sultry ballad or the world’s saddest ice cream truck?
I’m okay with saying that Elton John fails to understand that “I’m Your Man” is not a song to which one ought rock out, which is why I think this is the definitive version: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ep2lzX2EG58
Don’t judge me.
Oh, Helen, you just got judged. Hard.
But of all people to appreciate Elton John of all people singing a song about masculine roles, I’d think it would be you.
Helen, I’m a bit amused that you managed to use the phrase “Don’t judge me” while writing a series of posts on shame culture.