“Hallelujah” to misogyny?. Leonard Cohen’s pseudo-hymn stars a…
By: Jonathan Poletti
Tags: Jeff Buckley, Music, Lyrics, Leonard Cohen, Life

“Hallelujah” to misogyny?

Leonard Cohen’s pseudo-hymn stars a punishing female

The world may never tire of delicate boys pretending to get earnest and “spiritual” as they perform Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” But I did—awhile back?

She tied you to a kitchen chair

She broke your throne, and she cut your hair

And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

Whether it plays at the grocery store or, bizarrely, at the recent Republican National Convention, I hear people trying to be “spiritual” without being religious. But how to get around that dumb stuff about women, that nameless “she” ever-torturing the poor man?

Thinking about the song, I’m flipping through old Leonard Cohen interviews. He says in 1985: “Most of my songs have confused God and woman.”

Let’s talk about the strangeness that is “Hallelujah”?

Post-Christian audiences seem to turn to the song as a kind of secular hymn.

The critic Simon Lewson calls it “liturgical music for secular people who still wanted to infuse their lives with a sense of the divine.”

To go into the history of the song is a reminder of how contrived this process has been. I’m reading a book about the song, Alan Light’s The Holy or the Broken. Cohen himself refused to be interviewed, as I realize the actual story of the song was probably that he was amazed over time his song had been rewritten in performance for quite different reasons than he’d have been able to imagine. He wasn’t about to ruin the fun, or profit.

What he did mention over time in interviews was oddly dodgy. He says he took a long time to write the song, sometimes a year and a half, sometimes four years, then by 2007 it was “at least five years.”

He’d often say the original had some 80 verses. His work on them took up two notebooks sometimes, or other times, up to 20 notebooks.

What he talked less about is that it was a thoroughly Jewish song.

Cohen was from a long line of rabbis and Jewish scholars, as he was one himself, in a way, and seems to have approached the song as a theological statement.

“It had references to the Bible in it, although these references became more and more remote as the song went from the beginning to the end,” he says in an interview quoted by Light. “Finally I understood that it was not necessary to refer to the Bible anymore. And I rewrote this song; this is the ‘secular’ ‘Hallelujah.’”

So here’s the truth: the song is about a Jewish man’s rejection of Judaism.

The ‘You’ he is singing too is never quite clear, but this presence is doing Jewish religious correction of him, like a mother.

You 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?

These are biblical references. To ‘say the Name’ in vain, and then for a Jew to respond he doesn’t know ‘the Name’—and if he did, would his Jewish corrector even care—is super Jewish.

For background here, see my article “How to say the name of God.”

If seen as a Jewish text, charting his conflicts with and then rejection of Judaism, the song makes a lot more sense. Note as well that Jews tend to see the Torah as a female force. (See Claudine Vassas’ “Presences of the Feminine Within Judaism” or Eliot Wolfson’s “Female Imaging of the Torah.”)

Cohen had a difficult relationship with both Judaism and modern Israel. (By 1973, he’s publicly pro-Palestinian.) In listening to his loopy delivery on his 1984 album Various Positions, I hear a story of religious disenchantment framed as a relationship with a woman, as makes a lot of sense in the context of biblical theology and Jewish culture.

But in lopping off the more biblically-tinged verses, he creates a song that suggests a romance with an actual woman.

As I read the actual storyline of Cohen’s original, it seems to be about a man who, in existential angst, turns to sex as a replacement for religion.

The verses which are later dropped in most cover versions later trace a narrative of descent from spiritual to sexual.

I did my best; it wasn’t much.

I couldn’t feel, so I learned to touch.

The sex is great, though. It feels divine!

I remember when I moved in you,

and the holy dove was moving too,

and every breath we drew was Hallelujah!

This feels like a jokey, almost campy, description of a Jewish man having an affair with a Christian woman. But to him, the Christian woman seems then to turn into a Jewish woman—another Delilah, another Bathsheba—an entrapping, enaring female, using sex to manipulate him.

They fight, and she’s better at that.

Now maybe there’s a God above

but all I ever learned from love

is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.

He ends up “cold” as his “Hallelujah” is “broken.” Boo hoo.

Only in the repeated chorus—“Hallelujah, Hallelujah”—do we feel the beauty in his sublime male soul. The woman remains, throughout, a distant, unfelt creature—a looming monster at the edges of the song.

The Pop or rather post-Christian version, stripped of two verses, is created in a 1991 cover by John Cale.

He recalls Cohen showing him “15 verses,” but he says he selected those “I identified with, because a lot of them are pretty religious, and I don’t have much credibility talking about religion.”

Cale was raised Christian, but was embittered against the faith after, at age 12, a church organist gave him lessons in the wrong organ. He writes in his memoirs: “He was trying to grab me and jerk me off, and in those short pants it was hard to avoid. It was distasteful and difficult to deal with. It lasted one spring and summer, and it certainly took care of my religious sensibility.”

The shortening of the song might then echo with the pain of a raped boy, whose connection to a spiritual tradition is abruptly terminated. The woman who “tied you to a kitchen chair,” etc., might be more likely identified as not female at all, but a male rapist at church.

But the music-hating female who “broke your throne,” etc., is still there, as the song remains an hymn of sympathy for a male victim of female attack. As the biblical narratives are also being horribly read—no male is harmed by women in the Samson and David narratives—it’s all just kooky misogyny.

The 1994 cover by Jeff Buckley follows the Cale version, as the song becomes a sensitive boy’s counterattack on an unfeeling female.

The version which appears on Grace is a bit of whispery prettiness wrapped around a nest of hostility. As the delicate Buckley sings his ode to female dominance, he’s the “broken Hallelujah,” the boy who’s already feeling like he won’t be getting better.

It’s an act that’s not aging well. Even in Oliver Lovesey’s 2004 paper, “Anti-Orpheus: Narrating the Dream Brother,” there’s a helpful framing of Buckley as “a kind of aggressively hetero camp,” a sort of straight drag queen.

He was a highly theatrical pretty boy—pretending that he wasn’t—even as his typical pose was “an enigmatic, brooding, but stylized melancholy,” a Narcissus who sings girlishly.

Coming on its heels, Rufus Wainright’s (gay) 2003 cover, like k.d. lang’s (lesbian) 2004 cover, try to keep the song’s vibe going as a kind of sexual outsider anthem, or something.

Though to the average listener, it’s all just sort of ‘pretty’.

Hallelujah…Hallelujah…

Which becomes, really, a weird, camp celebration of sexist horror.

“Cohen is music’s favorite misogynist and go-to depresser of all human beings,” as Nico Lang writes.

All of his work strikes me as a cold shower of sexual and religious problematics. A perfect product of its time, to be set next to the novels of Philip Roth and many other similar cultural productions.

But there’s not much for me to take forward, that’s for sure. The song’s many covers are driving a truckload of psychic damage. It is odd, for sure, how much gay material attaches to the song as time goes by, and could even be understood as an expression of religious angst, thrust out of religious tradition, which is so typically gay.

Which would be fine—except the fact of it all being framed through an attacking woman. And the idea of it being somehow “spiritual” when the song’s spirit is one of disconnection and attack.

The song should be seen as a camp classic. In letting it go as some kind of spiritual statement, I’d see an act of acceptance that the human race is really only just learning, after so many dark ages, to be really human.

Male and female, as the Bible says God made us. Together.