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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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A.B.'s Top Ten List for 2008 - Why People Should Stop Covering Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’
1) Because the world doesn’t need any more teary, hushed, faux-profound ‘special moments’ on televised singing contests.
2) Leonard has paid off his debt now, and thanks you.
3) Leonard’s former Buddhist monk instructors are pestered at their local corner store by patrons who burst into spontaneous performances of the song.
4) Okay, maybe Styx or somebody could do a bangin’ version. Or - Dokken!
5) The song is kind of … white, isn’t it? Worse, the suspicion remains that it thinks it’s black.
6) Someone, somewhere, will lower a microphone into the depths and play Hallelujah to the whales.
7) Because unquestionably mighty as the song is, there are one or two infelicities in there, such as rhyming ‘hallelujah’ with ‘do ya’. Len can pull this off - only Len can pull this off.
8) There have been 170 attempts at the song to date, by all sorts of unlikely artists. Where will it end? Who’s next? Cher? Kim Jong Il? Malcolm Gladwell?
9) Because kids will think ‘you don’t need drugs to get high’. Now just a minute there, youngsters.
10) Because Jeff Buckley’s take on this song is everything the others want to be.
[I beg to differ - L.M.]