Hallejulah, Leonard Cohen Wrote Other Songs!

It's a Beautiful Song, But it is Not the Only Song

You might think I’m going to write about the American election, but I’m not, other than in a roundabout way. I heard a clever person on a podcast (may have been the GLOP podcast) say that Harris versus Trump is like a void versus a vortex. I thought that was pretty funny and accurate. What’s your pleasure, American friends? But what I really want to write about here is Leonard Cohen’s Hallejulah. There have been at least two occasions now - 2020 and 2024 - when the Cohen estate has chastised the Donald Trump campaign for use of Hallejulah at events. Fair enough. I am aware of public domain rules and also, there is just a matter of respect. If someone asks you not to use their music - whether it is legal or not for you to do so - it is probably decent to cease and desist.

I would not object if public figures - and even some private figures - ceased and desisted from using Cohen’s Hallejulah (not to be confused with Handel’s glorious Hallejulah chorus) for a bit. Don’t misunderstand: I love the song in all its iterations and with all of Cohen’s lyric changes over the years. (My personal favourite verse? “Maybe there’s a God above/But all I’ve ever learned from love/was how to shoot at someone who outdrew ya?”) But one must wonder how it has come to be considered suitable for so many events. Campaign rallies, Olympic ceremonies (the awesomely talented k.d. lang sang it at the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010), in 2021 when newly-elected Joe Biden held a tribute to the victims of Covid, when the U.S. moved its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem (a morally sound historical and political move, but as a friend of mine said about the song choice, “They should have used Jerusalem of Gold instead.”), at least two weddings and one hipster mass I have attended, and when Kate McKinnon sang it on Saturday Night Live’s first show after Trump was elected in 2016. That week also happened to be the week Cohen died - ostensibly, she was singing it as a tribute to him, but anyone watching knew she was also mourning the election. It was ham-handed.

And those instances are all just off the top of my head. If I did some research - if I were not so lazy - I would bet I would find countless more examples of the mostly inappropriate use of Hallejulah: birthday parties, retirement ceremonies, golf and bowling tournaments, office Christmas parties, border skirmishes. If we had a time machine, we could have convinced them to use it in 1945 during the surrender ceremony of Japan on the USS Missouri.

When Cohen died, I was studying in Italy and I was truly distraught. I adored him and his music. I announced his death to my classmates and professore - there were no Canucks in my class, so I was not surprised when my mostly 20-something fellow students expressed puzzlement. Who was Leonard Cohen? I was about to answer when a know-it-all Austrian dude said, “Ha scritto Hallejulah.” He wrote Hallejulah. Er yeah, he did, Wilhelm. And he wrote, like, a million other songs that were awesome. I said this and went so far as to ask my prof if I could commandeer his laptop and screen to play some other Cohen tunes for the class and talk about Montreal’s Jewish community and its arts legacy, Cohen and Irving Layton, and the 1950s and 1960s in Canada. He allowed it. Among the songs I shared was Take this Waltz, a selection for which a Hungarian classmate of mine thanked me. And yes, I did that all in highly imperfect Italian. (Rather than teach a mini-seminar, all I wanted to do that day was scream, “That is not his only song! Ja, Wilhelm?”)

Cohen was not a great poet - he was no Keats or Tennyson. But to be fair, I don’t think Canada has produced any poet of that calibre - maybe French Canada has (Emile Nelligan?). His songs are another matter - often brilliant, funny, bittersweet, original. Still, his poetry was meaningful to me in high school - thank you, Mrs. Christensen, best English teacher ever, who also introduced us to Thomas Hardy and Evelyn Waugh. One poem of Cohen’s we read with her was All There is to Know About Adolf Eichmann. With that poem, she opened up an interest in the Holocaust, something we had - oddly perhaps - touched on less in my history classes. No knock on my high school history teachers, who were very good.

(Side rant: my only really bad teachers in high school were my Latin and math teachers. And it’s telling, because my oldest brother - today is the 12th anniversary of his death - always told me I was not bad in math, but that I had been the victim of bad math teachers. Now that I am older, I suspect he was correct, because I am discovering that I am pretty good at math, it turns out. As for my Latin teacher, he was dreadful on a personal level, though today I could still tell an ancient Roman that Metella is in the kitchen and that the dog is barking in the street. On report card day one year, I got seven A grades and one B. The teachers had to sign our cards, so that day, Mr. Latin Teacher signed mine, looked at it and held it up to the class and made fun of me for the B. Like, seriously? I thought I would crumble up and die.)

Back to Cohen, as fun as that trip down memory lane was: another noteworthy song of his is Who by Fire, based on Unetanneh Tokef, a Hebrew prayer (Jewish readers, correct that if I am wrong). He wrote the song after visiting Israeli troops during the Yom Kippur war. You can read more about this in Matti Friedman’s excellent Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai. And if you are a fan of the television series The Americans, which all sane people are, Who by Fire is used to impressive advantage during the fourth season finale.

All of that to say that I love Hallejulah. I am not a bad Canadian. But I don’t love it overused and stupidly used. I mean, how can something be fitting for the Olympics, during a ceremony commemorating the dead, during a manic election rally…and probably coming to a grocery store near you? At least I’ll be able to sing along. There is a song I despise that is overused and stupidly used: John Lennon’s Imagine. As a witty media colleague of mine once said, “The lyrics of Imagine are not the answer to the problem. They are the problem.” So true. The already questionable Paris Olympics ceremony this summer included someone on a boat on the Seine singing Imagine and then making an empty, sanctimonious statement about world peace. I remember thinking - glad they didn’t drag Hallejulah into this.

One song I think is highly appropriate for any politician is You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Those lyrics speak to voters. As I recall, Trump’s campaign used that one a fair amount in 2016 and the Rolling Stones asked him to stop - I believe his team continued to use the song. I have been interested to learn, among other things, that campaign songs in the United States go back to John Adams and that Al Jolson wrote one for Warren Harding. When I lived in Turkey, there happened to be an election going on and there was a pop song used by one of the parties. They would send trucks through the streets blaring it - it may or may not have been this. (If I have any Turkish readers, please advise. I could be conflating things here, but I do remember this song.)

In the last century, JFK used High Hopes, LBJ used Hello Dolly (changed to Hello Lyndon), FDR had Happy Day Are Here Again, Harry Truman had I’m Just Wild About Harry, and I seem to recall Tony Blair paraphrasing the Spice Girls’ Wannabe when he was seeking votes in 1997. But I can’t help but feel songs and celebrities were better back then - yes, that includes the Spice Girls.

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Happy Hallowe’en y’all. Be careful out there, princesses and superheroes, ghosts and goblins. I have to man the doors, as spouse will be watching some kind of sport, after having done his part - carving the Jack O’Lantern.

[This fella needs some dental work. Photo: me, earlier tonight.]