by Daniel Kreps in Rolling Stone
Tuesday, November 22, 2016
Thursday, November 10, 2016
Friday, October 14, 2016
Tori Kelly and the Effect of The Hallelujah Effect: In Memoriam
Tori Kelly’s performance in September 2016 at the televised broadcast of the 2016 Emmy Awards exemplifies the “effect” of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, as many news and social media reports attest. Called by some news anchors a "cover" of Jeff Buckley's (rather than Cohen's) Hallelujah, a cover of a cover, runs many covers deep.
To get the effect of the Hallelujah Effect, to get Tori Kelly’s brilliance, one has to watch the
video excerpt: the Hallelujah effect is effected via broadcast, a “live,” as it were, music video.
Tori Kelly posted it in full on her Facebook page one of the few places on the net where one can see more than a snippet or excerpt of her performance (there are good monetized reasons for this and her Capitol records webpage likewise links to the
video on her FB page).
To see
what blew the audience of viewers away, including Rolling Stone and elsewhere, one has to see the video.
This is not a matter of the song as such or the voice alone.
The “Hallelujah Effect,” however paradoxical this may appear, is not produced simply by singing Hallelujah, however beautifully or stunningly one does so, whether one is k.d.lang or John Cale or Jeff Buckley, or, to be sure and in the hit of the moment, Tori Kelly.
This is not a matter of the song as such or the voice alone.
The “Hallelujah Effect,” however paradoxical this may appear, is not produced simply by singing Hallelujah, however beautifully or stunningly one does so, whether one is k.d.lang or John Cale or Jeff Buckley, or, to be sure and in the hit of the moment, Tori Kelly.
Of
course: Tori Kelly has the ‘Voice,’ yes and to be sure: this is how she came to
fame at 14, as Wiki will tell you, by posting YouTube videos of herself, and then through American Idol (not by winning), and she gives
a lovely performance of the song.
But what makes it work, the effect of the effect, is priming, a complex phenomenon that works retrospectively, as it were, coming into consciousness by the backstair.
But what makes it work, the effect of the effect, is priming, a complex phenomenon that works retrospectively, as it were, coming into consciousness by the backstair.
Tori Kelly’s Emmy performance is not just Tori Kelly, but is brought together
via the video production: once again, the videography behind the scenes, front and center and completely coordinated with her singing; this is a little music
video that takes us, her viewers, with her through and into Cohen’s song and
into our own minds, our own associations — that is the beauty of priming: it’s
both individually targeted and universal.
This year, taking a cue from the Oscar ceremonies, hits and misses both, the Emmy Awards offered viewers a literally filmic montage for their In Memoriam segment.
In this, no one talks about the
great stars we have lost as in tributes of days of gone by (Henry Winkler talks about Garry Marshall but, as a producer, Marshall made stars, he wasn’t himself one of them save for actors who know better, but that is very insider thing to do).
So the Emmy Awards succeeded, not that this is new, Hollywood has been trying to pull just this kind of thing off for quite a few years
now, nothing less marvelous than their very own self-touted ‘silver screen’ magic: using interleaved snippets of film and gif-like moving pictures, literally, the actors themselves wink to us, smile at us, laugh and speak to us, again, themselves.
The song has a wonderful design, as Bob Dylan has very recently pointed this out, quoted in the current issue of the New Yorker, noting as part of Cohen’s lyric genius his compositional style:
“Even the counterpoint lines -- they give a celestial character and melodic lift to every one of his songs. As far as I know, no one else comes close to this in modern music. Even the simplest song, like The Law, which is structured on two fundamental chords, has counterpoint lines that are essential and anybody who even thinks about doing this song and loves the lyrics would have to build around the counterpoint lines. -- Bob Dylan
And, as the song reaches one of its many rolling peaks -- and thus the musicologist who taught at Brooklyn College (and big band era clarinetist), Ernest McClain (note Brooklyn College's post commemorating his recent death) and corresponded with me as I was writing The Hallelujah Effect, compared the song and its chords to Summertime (a comparison I found frustrating to say the least) -- we see and we hear, in the longest of the clips measured in seconds, Alan Rickman.
The mini-clip is comparatively long (objectively speaking) but also because it includes the silence that offers an acoustic window to the refrain, Hallelujah of Tori Kelly singing in the background, grace of the calm pauses that made him and his voice irreplaceable (in this case, modulated by a southern accent).
As Rickman says, as Dr. Alfred Blalock, in the 2004 Emmy Award winning film, Something The Lord Made:
“I think we should remember not what we lost … but what we’ve done.” (2:06)
The
movements of each vignette, each memory, evoke, this is the way priming works, recognition, and that recognition calls
forth, thank you Proust, thank you Freud, Adorno complains about this, emotion,
that is both delight and pain, capturing the eye and keeping the viewer’s
attention while Cohen’s song and Tori Kelly’s performance captures the ear and entrains
the mind. The Hallelujah Effect gets you to that
kind of slam dunk.
And it works and we
are moved and grateful to be so moved. Hallelujah.
Everything,
especially our brains on social media, twitter but not less our anxious
attention to our cell phones, not just for the tweets but tricked out with apps
in place of the weird but accurate terminology that Adorno used to speak of the
physiognomics of what he called the “radio face.”
The Hallelujah Effect adds a few easy to miss questions about the nature of desire, male and female, and the nature of objectification.
That’s where Leonard Cohen and k.d. lang come in. To learn more about erotic generosity, read Simone de Beauvoir, and to read Simone de Beauvoir, read Debra Bergoffen's The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir!
The Hallelujah Effect adds a few easy to miss questions about the nature of desire, male and female, and the nature of objectification.
That’s where Leonard Cohen and k.d. lang come in. To learn more about erotic generosity, read Simone de Beauvoir, and to read Simone de Beauvoir, read Debra Bergoffen's The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir!
Friday, October 7, 2016
Who? The Question of Leonard Cohen’s Who By Fire
Like the Hallelujah psalm which praises the name of God, Cohen’s Who By Fire retells, recounts, counting by count, the new year prayer, Unetanah Tokef — who will be inscribed. This is the meaning, the point, the blessing of the New Year greeting, L’shanah tovah, may you be inscribed — and, of course, what is at stake is fate, one’s own fate, one’s own destiny. In this case that is what is to be, what is ordained for each one of us.
The judgment of the high holy days, the judgment of the new year, is the judgment of the Lord, as all are brought before the lord, so we hear the words, so Cohen heard them as well. I repeat this here, but only to get to Cohen’s verse, as a prayer to grace the holiest days of the year (which already tells us that it will be a very long prayer...).
What is decided is fate and because this is a prayer what is also emphasized is hope, the chance of mercy.
As the end of the prayer makes plain, and the logic of the high holy days sets Yom Kippur, the day of atonement to answer the conclusion of this Rosh Hashannah New Year, prayer: “But repentance, prayer and righteousness avert the severe decree.”
The judgment of the high holy days, the judgment of the new year, is the judgment of the Lord, as all are brought before the lord, so we hear the words, so Cohen heard them as well. I repeat this here, but only to get to Cohen’s verse, as a prayer to grace the holiest days of the year (which already tells us that it will be a very long prayer...).
What is decided is fate and because this is a prayer what is also emphasized is hope, the chance of mercy.
As the end of the prayer makes plain, and the logic of the high holy days sets Yom Kippur, the day of atonement to answer the conclusion of this Rosh Hashannah New Year, prayer: “But repentance, prayer and righteousness avert the severe decree.”
See further here:
Tuesday, September 20, 2016
The Ongoing Hallelujah Effect
Thursday's virtual lecture for Philosophy and Digital Media may be found here
This video is also available at the Video On Demand - Fordham University
Libraries Digital Collections.
See link below, but the spooling before the video loads can seem very long depending on your connection: http://digital.library.fordham.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/BabBabich/id/6/rec/15
Intriguingly, the topic of this lecture (which all about ‘covering’ Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah as well as apparent ubiquity of such covers as well as the conventions that accrue to these covers as the song is used in popular media, television, movies, but also award ‘shows,’ the ‘effect’ I call The Hallelujah Effect), was also the subject of an article in the Monday edition of the New York Times, “How
Pop Culture Wore Out Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’” by Nick Murray.
Or for a link for those who like html:
Despite some some surprising omissions (the author does not manage to mention kd lang), the article -- about the choice of music for Sunday night’s Emmy Awards and which includes a useful selection, which as I point out along with Bryan Appleyard who years ago made a similarly journalistic point, barely grazes the surface of such covers -- the question remains a timely one.
It might thus be worth reflecting that my lecture itself also turns on performance music video, k.d. lang’s performance of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah which was originally presented at a Canadian Pop Music award show or concert event, the 2005 Juno Awards.
The text on which the video lecture is based is also published online, including illustrations not in this case of images but embedded music videos, ergo just as ‘digitally’ as you please (the digital archaeology is part of this):
Perfect Sound Forever online music magazine presents…
The lecture became a book, The Hallelujah Effect: Philosophical Reflections on Music, Performance Practice and Technology, first published in Ashgate’s Folk and Pop Musicology series in 2013 and now available via Routledge, available at a discount at the Routledge page (see previous link) and also available at The Juilliard School book store.
Monday, August 29, 2016
Monday, August 15, 2016
Royal Music Association - Philosophy and Music.
Of course it would be more accurate to say mostly 'analytic philosophy' and music.
q.v. should you doubt it this array of
Pictures from aeons ago, taken in 2012, including Andrew Bowie, Lydia Goehr, Roger Scruton, et al and sundry, all rescued from imminent 'closing of the net,' i.e., the shuttering of Picasa.
Drat on that last.
"Lydia Goehr now raises a useful question by noting what Adorno does beyond what we take him to be saying." 20 July 2012 Tweet. Ye olde.
I also offered a paper there that was in production as The Hallelujah Effect (published in 2013) sort of like the picture below which was taken at the Phenomenology and Media conference in San Diego (I took all the pictures in London ... I also took pictures in San Diego, but not this one...)
The book was about k.d. lang, just one song, one version...
In the context of the culture of the cover (as such)
covering the "most famous" song in the world, Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah...
Which was to be sure about King David. And his song.
By way of the radio face, as Theodor Adorno wrote about the Current of Music
And Adorno and the Princeton Radio Project (and Adorno) and all that jazz
Just to get to Nietzsche and Music. That is to say, literally for Nietzsche tragedy, the Greek music drama...
Here's Orpheus.
And the becoming-human of dissonance, that is, of course, compositionally speaking, Beethoven
q.v. should you doubt it this array of
Pictures from aeons ago, taken in 2012, including Andrew Bowie, Lydia Goehr, Roger Scruton, et al and sundry, all rescued from imminent 'closing of the net,' i.e., the shuttering of Picasa.
Drat on that last.
I also offered a paper there that was in production as The Hallelujah Effect (published in 2013) sort of like the picture below which was taken at the Phenomenology and Media conference in San Diego (I took all the pictures in London ... I also took pictures in San Diego, but not this one...)
And the space of sound. And time.
And a fair amount of digital reflection...
Monday, August 1, 2016
Sunday, July 31, 2016
Covering Covers: John Cage 4'33 by Dead Territory
John Cage - 4' 33'' Death Metal Cover by Dead Territory
Monday, July 25, 2016
Wednesday, July 20, 2016
Monday, July 11, 2016
Halleulah in Naumburg
Philosophisches Abendgespräch ....
Der “Hallelujah Effekt”: Zur technischen Reproduktion des Klangs oder Musik
Was wird geboten?
The Hallelujah Effect setzt ein mit einer Analyse eines Liedes von Leonard Cohen, den berühmten Hallelujah und einer einzigartigen YouTube-Video-Performance durch k.d. lang und u.a., Nina Simone, und verortet sie anschließend in einer ausführlichen Auseinandersetzung mit der immer weiter um sich greifenden Kultur der Faszination Sozialmedien (Facebook und Twitter). Er wirft ein Licht auf die gegenwärtige Netzwerkkultur und konfrontiert sie mit Adornos Überlegungen zum ,Raum‘ des musikalischen Klanges. Doch von hier wird Nietzsches Mahnung aufgegriffen, ,mit unseren Ohren zu lesen‘, wie es die Griechen taten, die die Erfinder einer Technik waren, den Klang mittels eines phonetischen Alphabets aufzuzeichen. Nietzsche erkennt darin den „Geist der Musik“ und veranschaulicht dies an niemand Geringerem für Nietzsches Verhältnis als Beethoven, obwohl wir könnten auch von Handel oder auch Bizet reden.
Babette Babich
z. Zt., Fulbright Professor
Humboldt University, Berlin
z. Zt., Fulbright Professor
Humboldt University, Berlin
Twittter: http://twitter.com/#!/babette_babich
Wann?
19:30 Uhr, Mittwoch, 20. Juli 2016
Wo?
Nietzsche-Dokumentationszentrum Naumburg
Jakobsmauer 12
06618 Naumburg/Saale
06618 Naumburg/Saale
Philosophisches Abendgespräch Prof. Babette Babich (New York): Der “Hallelujah Effekt”: Zur technischen Reproduktion des Klangs oder Musik, | Naumburg/Saale
Monday, July 4, 2016
Monday, May 30, 2016
Thursday, March 10, 2016
Saturday, January 30, 2016
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