when christian artists change the line in hallelujah from “maybe there’s a God above” to “I know that there’s a God above” >:c
#idk why i’m so unreasonably angry#maybe cuz it’s my fav line
it’s also because Leonard COHEN (!) was Jewish and this is a quintessentially Jewish line, and changing it to that level of Annoying Certainty is stripping it of its Jewish meaning and imbuing it with that particularly American smug evangelical Christian attitude that makes me tired, so very tired
THAT IS EXACTLY WHY
I don’t think I’ve heard any cover artist sing my favorite verses
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?
There’s a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken HallelujahI did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujahum woah
They did those lines in Sing!
Leonard Cohen wrote literally over 80 verses for the song. Each of the over 300 (!) versions has maybe 5-7 of those verses, gleaned from copies of Cohen’s notes. Mixing and matching those verses is totally okay (Cohen himself said he liked the combo of verses Jeff Buckley chose more than the ones he originally recorded). What is not okay and what will never be okay is changing the words in those verses in any fundamental way to change the meaning. Reworking “remember when I moved in you/and the Holy dove was moving too” to come from the perspective of the receptive sexual partner? Totally chill. Changing the intrinsically Jewish nature of “well maybe there’s a god above” in any way? I’ll fucking stab you with the bobby pin holding my yarmulke on.
Steel Phoenix Studios 