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!
