So, it looks as if it's all over bar the counting. One way or another, my favourite song ever written is going to be the UK's Chrismukkah No1.
In the last couple of days, a young lady named Alexandra won the TV talent contest, X-Factor, and her cover version of The Cohen's Hallelujah hit the (largely virtual) shelves today. Almost immediately, various internet campaigns began to prevent this single reaching number one in the charts - largely predicated around encouraging people to pay en masse for downloads of Jeff Buckley's cover. The original is also now in the charts, although languishing far below.
I cannot claim to have watched The X-Factor, nor to know very much about this year's winner. I'm sure she's a lovely person, and I congratulate her on her achievement and wish her all the best in the future. But I find myself sympathizing with those who would do her down, and actively try to thwart her festive success. Why?
Is this just snobbery? The X-Factor is a proley show for proles, and the proles shouldn't presume to mess with the sacred texts of us poetry-loving intellectuals? Maybe it is. Maybe it is just that. This does not seem like a very noble emotion to feel, least of all towards a nice young woman who has worked incredibly hard to bring her talents to fruition.
I sincerely hope that this is not the alpha and the omega of it, not least because I have no desire to be forced to think of myself as a priggish, small-minded cunt. I hope it is a little more complex than that.
When I first heard Leonard Cohen sing Hallelujah, and in the hour that followed, while I listened to it over and over again, letting the lyrics and the incredible chord progressions first hit me like a sledgehammer and then soak inexorably into my malnourished spiritual bones, it quite simply changed my life. Just as with Like A Rolling Stone a decade earlier, I experienced a moment of clarity and kinship that turned me inside out - a moment of pure fucking-hell-he-just-said-EXACTLY-what-I've-been-trying-to-grasp-at-so-impotently-in-my-own-writhing-mind. It's not something you recover from quickly or easily, or, indeed, ever.
And at the end of the day, it's hard to see an artefact that has profoundly helped me to clarify my feelings about g*d and the universe, taken by someone innocent and unconcerned and turned into something mawkish, superficial and, in the end, ordinary. A damn good tune that lends itself well to an accomplished, soaring female voice, with some weird-ass incomprehensible lyrics thrown in.
I hope that it is this, rather than simple snobbery, that is giving me that slightly cold feeling in my abdomen whenever I think about mindless goons swaying to Alexandra's Hallelujah in the BBC studio on Christmas Day.
