It is with reference to music as this is increasingly heard on YouTube that I explore k.d. lang’s interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah together with the resonances of Cohen’s own various recorded Hallelujahs with its own musical world of antecedent Hallelujahs.

From Adorno to Nietzsche

And if my engagement with Adorno’s theoretical reflections on radio and music and consumer culture may seem to go without saying in a reflection on the “Hallelujah Effect,” everything I do in this book is for the sake of articulating what Nietzsche called the “becoming-human of dissonance.” 

Interlude -- Gene Kelly

Broadcasting

Songs broadcast on the radio have a quality all their own, even if we scarcely attend to this quality today. 

Nor do we have trouble recalling the particular acoustic quality of radio: we know the sound radio makes and we can notice the quality of radio transmission as such and very specifically, say, to use Adorno’s own example in his Current of Music, if we are tuning a radio set.

But if new technology can (and it is important to note that it does not always) make this a less common experience — even satellite radio drifts, and the internet has a rather famous instability from time to time — we nonetheless notice the ‘sound’ or the fact of radio transmission when the weather changes or else when we are moving about or driving, due to the call letters constantly announced as well as the character of broadcast sound.   

As in the case of cellphones, this fading quality of wireless broadcasting is one of the things that has not changed since the beginning of publically accessible radio broadcasting in 1922 (which public broadcasting should thus be distinguished from Nikola Tesla’s invention of the technology needed for radio broadcast or Guglielmo Marconi’s first transmission in 1895).

‘On the Radio’

Although what I call The Hallelujah Effect is all about cover versions, I did not heard Cohen’s Hallelujah for the first time in such a version by another singer, but as sung by Cohen himself. 

Naturally enough and to be precise, I should say that I didn’t actually “hear” Cohen at all or in a “real” sense, because I was not in his physical presence. Of course not. 

And the point here is that the claim that one has “heard” a singer, any singer, any performer, is almost never meant as the report of an immediate or direct experience. 

This is different in practice from the classical enthusiast who usually means that he or she has heard this or that performer in concert, but even there, familiarity with a recorded performance can also be what is meant. 








In general, we take technical reproduction or mediation for granted, and we pay no particular mind to the where or the how of it. 

Covert Operations

Covert priming corresponds to what Vance Packard triumphantly reported as having made the front page of the London Sunday Times in 1956: 

“certain United States advertisers were experimenting with ‘sub-threshold effects’ in seeking to insinuate messages to people past their conscious guard.”

To this day we speak of prime time, just as we speak of radio and television programming. And we think nothing of it. 

At the same time, social science scholars seem to fall over themselves to argue or better said to insist that there is no such priming effect or else that it is very general or very minimal, seemingly to reassure confidence in consumer choice and free will: it is not for nothing that a leading research trend in the social sciences is called rational choice.

Thus an abundance of studies (particularly in disciplines not contributing to marketing research) insist upon the inefficacy of priming, not unlike US academic confidence in the non-existence of propaganda in United States. 

Yet and at the end of the day, empirical research repeatedly confirms that “priming” (that would be what the popular press calls “subliminal persuasion”) does indeed work, down indeed to the brand itself.