Hallelujah

Alexandra Burke's X Factor single Hallelujah is fastest-selling download

Hallelujah, simply, is one of the greatest songs ever recorded. It has been covered with increasing frequency (Bon Jovi, for example, included it in their concerts last year). The covers tend, unfortunately, if predictably, to follow the John Cale cover rather then Leonard Cohen's original.

Unfortunately, because the original was perfect, and perfectly Cohen. To title a song Hallelujah is label it as overtly religious. The religious imagery in the lyrics strengthens that association. At the same time the Cohen's lyrics are unabashedly sacrilegious. Cohen's gravelly, earthy voice singing, without artifice, the verses grounds them very much in-this-world. He is, to be sure, tired and jaded, but frankly, or stoic-ly, so. The chorus, backed by the choir, hearkens back to the more traditional (for example, Handel's) Hallelujah. But if the more traditional Hallelujah is a celebration of simple transcendental faith, Cohen's chorus reaches for something to replace that faith irretrievably lost. It finds the traces of that possibility in the choir. The singer in the verse is hauntingly isolated, in the chorus he sings-together, almost hand-in-hand.

Given the parelels, it was a great song to include in the Shrek -- which was a fairy tale for people too grown up or cynically post-modern to believe in fairy tales -- soundtrack.

The covers, starting with Cale's version, tend to lose both Cohen's grounded verses, and singing-together chorus. The song becomes an simple excuse for mournful, soulful, spiritual vocal gymnastics. At its best it contains shades of the troubled complexity of the original, at its worst (see: Wainright, Rufus), it become a whiny trainwreck.

To give Ms Burke some credit, her version better then most, reaches back to the spirit of Cohen's original. She opens the song with the mournful, soulful, spiritual vocal gymnastics that mark, or rather: mar, the Cale inspired covers, but she ends it with an almost frankly religious, choir backed, singing-together. It is more simplistically a song of faith lost and found then the original, but that is not a critisism.