Thursday, March 8, 2012

You don’t really care for music, do ya?

Indeed and during the heyday of the sexual revolution which also for good measure included women’s ‘liberation’ (if we may speak of that failed undertaking in that way),1 when it was popularly protested that women ought not perhaps be regarded as sex objects, men were fond of countering with the assertion that they would love to be sex objects. 

And they claimed this not because it was true but because they were keen on what they called ‘free love’ or sex without strings (and s&m, until kd lang’s singing of Cohen’s Hallelujah was not part of  Cohen’s reference to the real anxiety, the unmanning threat consequent to being tied to a kitchen chair, as indeed in the original circumstance that that was for Samson himself).


In fact, that is, in practice or real life, men do not ‘like’ women who come on to them (ladies at the bar, please take note). And women know this and this is why they dress and act and walk the way they do. But even suborned as objects to the subject who gets to desire in the first place, women do not get close to loving men for their beauty (unless arranged in such a way that men do not notice, just take care not to give yourself away). At best one might adjust a tie, choose a shirt, mend a shaving scar, etc. 

But woman, as such, remains the sexual, the erotic object for both heterosexual men as also for both lesbian and  for heterosexual women, though one can take a shot at changing that if one wishes to stage some kind of performance-inspired drama, not a full on erotic encounter. 

Not really. 

Although it is the erotic encounter that matters here, it is music that is in question in Cohen’s song: You don’t really care for music, do ya? Set up by the inside talk of a secret chord, that David had and it pleased the Lord, it was, I have said, lang’s rendering of Cohen’s exposed illustration of the verse: it goes like this: the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift, that caught me, utterly, and I needed to see her do it for it to have the effect that it did. Not only acoustic, but visual, not only visual, but dramatic and add to that the resonance with life, the body, god, and time, the intellect, and sex: a minor riff on the 19th century ideal of the Gesammtkunstwerk

Is kd lang’s version different from other versions? How so? How does she do what she does? Indeed, how does she manage to do it again and again — though professional singers do this all the time: c’est son métier, quand même, but this is also why they lip synch their songs from time to time, singing back up, as it were, with themselves.


1 See Babich, “Women and Status in Philosophy,” Radical Philosophy, 160 (March/April 2010): 36-38.