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. 

       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. 

       Priming, the means of the media as it were, especially digital media, works with triggers, not merely acoustic but also visual and for the visual one needs movement and, just as with the acoustic, one needs repetition.  

       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!

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.” 

See further here:

Babette Babich, "Hallelujah and Atonement"

in Jason Holt, ed., Leonard Cohen and Philosophy