Effects, Mediations, and Primes

Rather a lot is needed to come to terms with the various versions of Cohen’s Hallelujah and the Hallelujah effect that is the Hallelujah song on the internet — not at all unlike the ads that seek to illustrate, in a sometimes unintentionally humorous fashion: this is your brain on drugs. 

To this extent, the Hallelujah effect as a phenomenon is all about entrainment and addiction. Like drugs, the joke can be varied: this is your brain on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter.

     

The 1998 movie, You’ve Got Mail, written by the late Nora Ephron and starring Tom Hanks and documenting the erotic subversion of the then AOL experience testifies in the interim to fair irrelevance by contrast with the larger phenomenon (and profit margin) of internet pornography or the even more comprehensive phenomenon of sexting but also online dating, from hookups to marriage. Thus and although it might have done so, Ephron’s film centered upon but was at the same time oblivious to the stimulus effect of AOL’s famous acoustic notification for the dynamic of the love story itself.  

This is a book about Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and in particular about kd lang’s several covers of that song, as well as about other songs that she sings, especially in their video presentations.  

It is about the relevance of John Cale’s cover of Cohen’s Hallelujah for kd lang’s cover as it is for everyone else covering Cohen’s song.