Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (35 page)

Clearly this refers to the passion of Christ, which Cohen has evoked in many places in his work. We don’t, however, find anything in this song evoking a resurrection: the erasure of the word is final and the tragedy of the incarnation unsurmountable. The flesh betrays the spirit in religion as in
eros
, and love, whether human or divine, is a burden the body cannot sustain. It’s perhaps no surprise then that
Recent Songs
ends on a detached, ironic note: “my darling says ‘Leonard, just let it go by / That old silhouette on the great western sky.’” The central questions of Western civilization, of matter and spirit, God and humanity, remain suspended beneath the shadow of an absconded deity. We may note in passing that, just as in the
Cloud,
God sheds darkness rather than light. “There is in God, some say, / A deep but dazzling darkness . . .” Henry Vaughan tells us in his wonderful poem “The Night” and this thought seems applicable here. Yet the reference is brief, casual, and even slyly dismissive.

Self-Overcoming

One might conclude then that Cohen has come to a sort of postmodern, skeptical stance. However, one of the admirable things in Cohen is that he has never stood pat. Since
Recent Songs
Cohen has, as is well known, become increasingly concerned with the meditative traditions of the Far East. Cohen has told us on
Various Positions
that he has longed for “nothing
to touch.” Taking this cue we might read his later turn to Zen Buddhism as part of his ongoing fascination with negativity and nothingness as
positive
energies.

However, this isn’t exactly new territory for Cohen. As Stephen Scobie reminds us, “Cohen’s saints must make their wills transparent to Nothing. The self is not sacrificed to some higher cause; the sacrifice of self
is
the higher cause” (p. 10). Scobie speaks of this longstanding tendency in Cohen as part of a “black romanticism” inherited from figures such as Baudelaire and Jean Genet. This black romanticism emphasizes the loss of ego or self through extreme states of consciousness and transgressive and self-destructive behavior. As Scobie puts it, “If the lack of social or political commitment in the fifties threw the artist back onto his naked self, then his exploration of that self might lead to its annihilation” (p. 9).

However, this nihilism of the black romantic isn’t all there is to the story. As Scobie tells us, “Cohen always retains a belief in the power and the beauty of love. But love can only enter the world once it has accepted the essential conditions of destruction and loss. Love is only for the broken, the maimed, the outcasts, the beautiful losers” (p. 14). This often lends poignancy and indeed compassion and humanity to some of Cohen’s darkest visions. More importantly, it reminds us that at their heart both Buddhism and Christianity are doctrines of compassion: they don’t evoke nothingness for the sake of nothingness as in the nihilistic hedonism of the black romantic. The aim of both traditions is the emptying of self for the sake of
salvation
, the liberation of both oneself and of all other beings as well from suffering. Thus, the Buddhist concept of Nirvana is nothingness and emptiness only by excess. As in
The Cloud of Unknowing
the nothing is nothing but the mind’s approach to the all.

Indeed, it seems a general fact of experience that things “become themselves” through self-overcoming: “He who would save his life must lose it.” So if the artist seeks a kind of selflessness or self-erasure, does this not make his art more comprehensive and objective? If the saint seeks to
empty his ego, isn’t it to attain a pure, disinterested love of all things? Certainly, in the Buddhist tradition the emptiness of
sunyata
(the void achieved by the cessation of desire) opens us to compassion for all beings and desire for their liberation from suffering. We are reminded by this that the negation or nothingness of which Zen speaks can equally be spoken of as a pure and clarified consciousness that surpasses all limitations of ego or self. If you like, the urge to “nothingness” that has been a longstanding part of Cohen’s work can, through Buddhist practice, find an explicitly positive focus.

Cohen hasn’t dropped names idly: the reference to
The Cloud of Unknowing
has in fact illuminated
Recent Songs
and indeed the trajectory of his career. It fits neatly in the context of deep spiritual concerns that shape Cohen’s earliest work and have persisted even to the present. Indeed, we might say that albums like
Recent Songs
concern themselves with the deepest and most longstanding issues of theology and spirituality. In particular, Cohen has explored the themes of nonbeing and emptiness as “supraconceptual” approaches to the divine. That he has done this in a way which sacrifices nothing of the emotional resonance of his art is a testament to his stature as a poet and musician.

20

The Happy Memes of “Hallelujah”

P
ETER
S
TONE

D
og eat dog. It’s a jungle out there. Survival of the fittest. Eat or be eaten. This is the kind of language people routinely use to describe the music world. It’s a rough, tough, take-no-prisoners kind of world. Nobody knows this better than Leonard Cohen. At the beginning of his musical career, for example, Leonard somehow signed away the rights to “Suzanne,” one of his best-loved songs, to a producer he worked with. More recently, he decided to begin touring again because his unscrupulous business manager embezzled most of his money, leaving him almost bankrupt. This is the law of the jungle at work here—at its most jungle-like.

In this dog-eat-dog world, it’s awfully hard to succeed in the music business. It takes both skill and luck. In
The Prince
, Machiavelli famously said that a leader can only control about half his fate—the rest is up to fortune. That certainly seems to be how the music world operates. Talent helps, but it makes no guarantees. And luck helps a lot, too—indeed, luck can prove essential (Spice Girls, anyone?)—but when the luck runs out, talent can mean the difference between continuing success and disappearance into obscurity (Spice Girls, anyone?).

All of this applies to songs as well as to singers and songwriters. Luck can make a big difference in a song’s fate, but at the end of the day, if you want a hit, it helps to have a really
great song. Take what is probably now Cohen’s most famous song, “Hallelujah.” There’s an enormous amount of luck in the history of that song. It originally appeared on Cohen’s album
Various Positions
(1984). Its American release was very troubled—Walter Yetnikoff, then-president of CBS Records, declined to release it in the U.S. (Yetnikoff supposedly told Cohen, “Leonard, we know you’re great, but we don’t know if you’re any good.”) A smaller label released the album in the U.S., and Columbia (parent company to CBS) finally released an American edition in 1990. And yet upon its release “Hallelujah” immediately won some fans, including a number of musicians whose covers kept the song alive and increased its reputation. John Cale recorded it for a Cohen tribute album in 1991. Jeff Buckley, in turn, was much taken by Cale’s version of the song, and used it as the basis for his own version, perhaps the most famous one to date. Cale’s version could be heard in the movie
Shrek
(2001), and a version by Rufus Wainwright appeared on that movie’s soundtrack. From there, the popularity of the song snowballed. The entire process is masterfully chronicled in Alan Light’s book
The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of “Hallelujah.”

It’s hard to look at the history of “Hallelujah” and not be struck by how much luck influenced the rise of the song from obscurity to superstardom. And yet it’s equally hard not to be struck by the song itself (although apparently Walter Yetnikoff was not). It’s a seriously impressive song. But what makes the song so great? What makes the song appeal to so many people? The music matters a lot, to be sure, but what about the lyrics? They are surely a critical part of the story. Why does the song speak to so many people all around the world?

Genes and Memes

If we want to understand what makes a song succeed, perhaps we should look at how the law of the jungle governs . . . the jungle. The natural world is governed by the laws of evolution, as first described by Charles Darwin in his classic
The
Origin of Species
(1859). Can evolutionary theory tell us anything about the appeal of “Hallelujah?” Let’s find out.

A good place to start any exploration of evolutionary theory is Richard Dawkins’s classic book
The Selfish Gene
, first published in 1976. According to Dawkins, natural selection induces a competition among genes for survival. Some genes, when combined together with other genes, produce an organism that is more likely to survive in its environment than other genes do. More specifically, some genes produce an organism that is more likely to pass on its genes than others. As a result, those genes will be more likely to survive than others. And so the world comes to be filled with genes that are successful at surviving. It looks like the world is filled with selfish genes, genes that are very good at taking care of their own self-interest. (I say “looks like,” of course—genes don’t think, and Dawkins nowhere says that they do.)

At the end of
The Selfish Gene
, Dawkins concludes that all evolution requires is “the differential survival of replicating entities” (p. 192). But could there be entities other than genes that replicate in an evolutionary process? Dawkins says yes. There is such a thing as
cultural
evolution. Cultural units—including scientific theories, works of art, novels, and yes, Leonard Cohen songs—compete to survive in human societies, just like genes compete to survive in the natural world. Some of them fail to attract human attention, or attract attention but then lose it, and so vanish from human life. Others get our attention and keep it, and so human beings keep talking about them over and over again. Dawkins calls these cultural units
memes
, and argues that evolution works on them much as it works on genes.

If Dawkins is right, then the law of the jungle governs our cultural products—our memes—much as it governs the natural environment. Can this fact help us to understand the success of “Hallelujah?” It might, but before answering this question we must first deal with another. Is “Hallelujah” a meme? This is a tricky question to answer. As Dawkins explains, it’s difficult even to decide what a gene is. It’s easy to say what genetic material is—it’s that stuff that makes up
our chromosomes, dictating the construction of the amino acids that control the creation of us. But it can be difficult to say where one gene ends and another begins. Similarly, it’s a little hard to say whether we should treat an entire song like “Hallelujah” as a meme, or whether it makes more sense to treat the parts that make up the song as different memes. This is a big problem in theories of cultural evolution. Sometimes an entire work of art, like a song or a movie, attracts and keeps people’s attention, and so thrives for a long time. But sometimes a single scene of a movie, or line from a song, has a staying power much greater than the entire work does. This can have strange effects upon our cultural memory.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
(1948), for example, is a great Humphrey Bogart movie, a very successful meme. But even more successful is the classic line, “We don’t need no stinking badges!” Millions of people who know nothing else about the movie “remember” that line—even though that exact line is never actually uttered in the movie!

So is “Hallelujah” one meme, or a bunch of memes? It’s hard to say. The problem is complicated by the fact that there are multiple versions of the song. The version Cohen released on
Various Positions
has four verses, but those four came out of a lengthy, agonizing process lasting years. During this process, Cohen composed and then rejected many verses—perhaps eighty, by his own count. After recording
Various Positions
, Cohen often varied the verses used in live performances of “Hallelujah.” John Cale asked Cohen for the complete set of verses for the song before recording his own version. Cohen offered fifteen, and Cale used five—two from Cohen’s original version plus three more. Together, these seven verses, plus the famous one-word chorus, seem to make up the song.

“Hallelujah” may contain many memorable lines, but it is the song itself that people continue to play and sing over and over again. And so I’m going to treat the entire song as a meme that has to survive in a world of other songs all competing for our attention. What features do the lyrics of “Hallelujah” have that might help the song outcompete its rivals?
One thing you immediately notice if you look at those lyrics is the abundance of references to religion. The song references biblical stories, such as the story of David and Bathsheba (“You saw her bathing on the roof / Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you”). It suggests “Maybe there’s a God above,” and so on. The very title of the song is a religious exclamation, equivalent to “Praise God!” The only other topic that receives anything like the attention given to religion in “Hallelujah” is sex. And even that topic is hard to separate from religion; Jeff Buckley described the song as the “Hallelujah of the orgasm.”

Because so much of “Hallelujah” is taken up with religion, it makes sense to ask how and why religious memes survive and thrive, and see if that sheds any light upon the success of “Hallelujah.” A good source on this topic is the book
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
by the philosopher Daniel Dennett. Dennett agrees with Dawkins that culture can be characterized as an evolutionary process in which memes compete for our attention, with the winners surviving and the losers fading away. He believes that this process can be used to understand what causes religious memes to survive. Perhaps
Breaking the Spell
can help us understand the “Hallelujah” phenomenon.