Tuesday, 25th August 2009.

Mama Mia, Let Me Go

It’s hardly hot off the press, but apparently Leonard Cohen is sick of ‘Hallelujah’.

According to an article in NME, Cohen reportedly told the Canadian Broadcasting Service that “I think it’s a good song, but too many people sing it”. He also says that he “was reading a review of a movie called Watchmen that uses it, and the reviewer said ‘Can we please have a moratorium on ‘Hallelujah’ in movies and television shows?’ and I kind of feel the same way.”

The article’s one comment (seriously, does no one read NME anymore?) describes him as a “miserable old fart” – a pithy, if hardly earth-shattering discovery – and suggests that he would have undoubtedly been happy with the royalties he received from the abundance of covers. This is almost certainly true, and suggests a certain double standard on the part of everyone’s favourite Canadian, but it’s hardly fair. Leonard’s recent spate of touring and recording has been fuelled by his dire financial situation as much as anything else, and while he may be biting the hand that feeds him, it’s not like he doesn’t need the money since the unfortunate business with Kelley Lynch.

To be honest, I can see his point. ‘Hallelujah’ is fast becoming this generation’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ (or ‘Yesterday’, or, um, ‘Streets of London’) given its incessant popularity. Rufus Wainwright describes it as “an easy song to sing…the music never pummels the words”. This explains the multitude of covers: everyone from John Cale to Katherine Jenkins, Jon Bon Jovi to Allison Crowe to Wainwright himself has tackled the song. Even before The X-Factor got hold of it, Cohen’s masterwork had more or less earned its stripes in the 21st century canon. It’s hard to sing it well, but it’s still easy to sing, and if you’re not at a sponsored fundraiser organised by Richard Dawkins, it’s a guaranteed crowd-pleaser.

Then there’s the Jeff Buckley version. Sparse, sparing and quite extraordinary, it’s the voice of a fallen angel singing from the depths of despair. It’s quite simply six minutes of the most spine-tingling music ever recorded, even if it’s actually an amalgamation of over twenty takes mixed into a master version, and it’s quite extraordinary. It’s also been implemented in every television programme in the history of TV, or at least since 1994. (Its use in The West Wing was beautiful, but Big Cook, Little Cook was pushing it a bit.)

‘Hallelujah’ is a song the public have taken very much to their hearts. Its themes of redemption and loss are vague enough for everyone to think that Cohen / Buckley / Wainwright et al. are singing about them, and to them. Over the course of three / four / five / six verses, depending on which version you’re listening to, Cohen takes in Old Testament theology by way of the orgasm. It’s blatantly sexual and its enduring appeal is therefore a little puzzling, given that the great British public still seem to be a little prudish about these things, but whatever the reason, it is quoted verbatim in blog entries and cards and played on iPods all over the world with alarming regularity. The very real danger here is that this is happening at the expense of other, equally good songs that are getting ignored simply because they’re not as instantly accessible, requiring as they do a little more time and effort on behalf of the listener.

It doesn’t just apply in the commercial sector. I can still remember when the church I attended for about half my life suddenly discovered Graham Kendrick. For years, it was ‘Shine Jesus Shine’ every week. Or ‘The Servant King’. Or ‘Rejoice’. If you have attended a service in the last twenty years that wasn’t purely the stomping ground of elderly ladies in crocheted bobble hats, the chances are you’ll know at least one of these. If not, suffice to say that they were three catchy, spiritually profound and thoroughly uplifting songs by a charismatic worship leader. You couldn’t move for them. Eventually Kendrick’s popularity waned somewhat, and he was replaced by Stuart Townend, who – like Graham before him – has a knack of writing songs that are instantly accessible to people who don’t attend church services regularly, and that even atheists don’t really mind singing.

I have a friend who’s a local preacher, and when he’d witnessed ‘In Christ Alone’ (one of Townend’s most popular songs, and one that we had at our wedding) for what must have been the thousandth time that year, he posted this on his faith blog:

“For several years, if a preacher in the Methodist church who really didn’t know much about modern hymns wanted to look contemporary, they’d pick ‘Shine Jesus Shine’ as one of their hymns. These days, ‘In Christ Alone’ is the traditionalist’s favourite modern hymn.

“Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying everyone who picks it is ignorant of other modern hymns (and I know plenty of people who pick it despite having a much wider repertoire of modern hymns than mine). I’m also not picking on the hymn – it’s my favourite modern hymn too, and pretty high up my “all time” list too. It expounds so much theology in such a small space, and does so in such a fine way – it would be hard to object, really. (I like ‘Shine Jesus Shine’ too, by the way.)

“I just get worried about familiarity breeding contempt. It would be a shame if anyone was turned off such a fine hymn because preachers choose it too often.”

When Stuart Maconie mentioned the Cohen / ‘Hallelujah’ story a few weeks back, he concluded the piece with an open question: what songs, given the choice, could you happily never hear again? Before we go any further, we really ought to define our terms, so concentrate for a moment: I’m not talking about one-hit-wonders, or novelty records that inexplicably assailed the heights of the top forty and then vanished into obscurity, only to turn up on compilation albums, Channel 4 Top 100 lists and, occasionally, the Chris Evans show. That was the sort of response I got from my team when I asked them – Mr Blobby, for example, was a clear favourite for a public hanging, as was Bob the Builder. Coincidentally, both records featured in a recent list of Bad No. 1s (actually, they both seem to feature in every single list of bad no. 1s in every single poll).

I’m also not talking about songs that you hate, or songs in a genre that doesn’t appeal. I could quite happily go the rest of my life, for example, without re-hearing Lady GaGa’s ‘Poker Face’, Destiny’s Child’s ‘Independent Women’, or anything by Craig David. Conversely, I’m sure there are a bunch of people out there who despise James Blunt, Miles Davis and Goldfrapp. While I’d be the first to advocate for a definition of standards, and the fact that despite obvious musical differences there are some bands who are simply better than others (example: The Beatles are better than Oasis. End of), musical preference is so subjective that there are always going to be varying tastes. One man’s meat.

No, instead I’m talking about the songs you used to love, but which you can no longer stand simply because they’ve been over-played. The ones that make every Mothering Sunday compilation, every Radio 2 playlist, and that saturate every shopping centre and restaurant down the country. (I’m sure that there’s a market for pre-loaded iPods for cafes, full of bland easy listening and classic pop, all ripped and encoded for you so that you don’t have to do it yourself in between totting up this week’s accounts and procrastinating about cleaning the cappuccino machine.) Instead of songs that you simply don’t like, I’m talking about overexposure: songs that you used to love, but that eventually – and almost inexplicably – wore out their welcome because they were played too much, everywhere.

When I posed the question for a group of friends, the answers I got were, I felt, rather safe and conventional. I shouldn’t have been surprised at this: the songs themselves must, by their very nature, be sufficiently conventional to warrant mass exposure on national radio and every other form of public music transmission. All the old favourites were there: ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ (a song I had on in the car this morning, and one which I fear is getting to be rather old hat these days), ‘Stairway To Heaven’ (presumably the Led Zeppelin original, as opposed to Rolf Harris’ hilarious cover), ‘Sweet Child of Mine’, ‘Lady Marmalade’, and even ‘Under The Bridge’. Someone suggested we make this into a playlist, although that might be counterproductive, and someone else replied that if all these songs were gathered into one place we would, at least, know to avoid them.

I remember feeling utterly despondent at this point, because the first record that jumped into my head when Maconie posed his open question was ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. This is miserable news because I am, by my own admission, a huge Queen fan. I first discovered them thanks to ‘Friends Will Be Friends’, followed them with vague interest through The Miracle (which is fit to be counted, some ten years later, amongst their best work) and then initially scoffed at Innuendo, before Freddie died and I realised what we’d lost. It took some years to discover the band properly, but when I did it was by way of the earlier 1970s albums: Sheer Heart Attack by way of News of the World by way of Jazz, and so on.

But it was ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ that was Queen at their most wondrous and strange, or at least that’s how it seemed to a bespectacled, overweight fifteen-year-old kid who worshipped his best friend and who was hooked on Wayne’s World. They’ve written better songs, and they’ve certainly produced more memorable videos (I don’t care that it’s innovative, it’s still boring), but at the time we couldn’t get enough of it. Learning the words, producing elaborate interpretative dance routines to the operatic section in the middle, seething when the song was edited on the Live Magic LP…all these were small, perfectly formed rites of passage that just became something we did. As for the Wayne’s World sequence (itself part of cinematic legend and, I suspect, almost old enough to be authentically classed as iconic), I have lost count of the number of times we sang along to ‘Bo Rap’ (as it came to be known) in the car. Who cared that no one knew what the hell it was about?

Learning how to play the song properly was a pain in the neck, particularly for someone who is not a trained pianist (at least not beyond grade four or five), but it comes in very useful at parties. It’s difficult to sing, but everybody is always willing to have a try: the best thing to do is down half a bottle of vodka and just go for it. You will lose the audience in the opera segment because no one knows where they are or when they’re coming in, but a crowd who’s had enough to drink will always drown out your mistakes, and it brings the house down.

For years I struggled with the multitude of changes as the song jumps from Bb to Eb to Ab and so on, and it’s ironic that now that I’ve finally become reasonably proficient at emulating Brian’s scale-based interlude, I no longer want to play the damned thing. Not even at parties, although I would if I were asked. Because the simple truth is that the song bores me. It’s gone from being a subversive, daring and highly innovative song, one that in many ways defined the genre, to one that’s been aped and imitated so often that it no longer holds any appeal. It’s ironic that the song they feared no DJ would play has been one that features on all manner of radio stations all over the world, and always played in its entirety. What was once edgy and different has, through no real fault of its own, become the status quo. Here’s a surefire way of courting controversy – instead of playing the whole thing, why not construct a radio edit? It would piss off the puritans (myself included, but more of that another time) no end, but hey, at least it would be different.

Perhaps it was G4 that killed the thing off. Having listened to their disastrous cover, during a 2005 Queen tribute evening that I covered some time ago, I found myself experiencing a brief, almost overwhelming urge to fish out the original, before realising that I simply didn’t want to. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with it. It’s just that like most people I’ve played it so often I can hear it in my head in almost note-for-note detail. So why bother fetching the CD? Rolf Harris’ cover, on the other hand, remains refreshingly unfamiliar, so I still enjoy giving it a spin. Oh, and it features a didgeridoo.

You see the problem? It’s not that it isn’t in itself a great record; it’s just that the song’s sense of innovation has always been its greatest asset. It isn’t the actual content, which remains above average, but the fact that it’s strung together the way it is. It’s not the individual components, but the fact that they’re assembled to form a coherent whole. And thus, the more you hear it, the less interesting it becomes. Compare and contrast this to a song like, for example, ‘Summer of ‘69’, which does not pretend to be anything but a short, snappy, uncomplicated rock song, and thus one which will always be guaranteed a place on my stereo.

Not to overdramatize any more than is strictly necessary, but coming to this conclusion does feel to an extent like putting away the childish things of youth. I think the fact that Chris Evans is willing to play it on a regular basis, typically accompanied by the words “You can never get sick of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’”, speaks volumes. In many ways, Chris Evans personifies the overexposed records culture: a selection of no more than about a hundred songs which get cycled according to his current mood, accompanied all too often by appalling karaoke. A celebration of the bland, banal and safe. Admittedly, I have recently decided that my hatred of his weekday radio show is somewhat misplaced: to all intents and purposes it’s a programme that’s aimed at children, presented by someone with the mentality of a child and the ego of a toddler, and perhaps I should be treating it as such. But I still reject wholeheartedly his crowd-pleasing list of classic rock standards on the grounds that it’s “what the people want”. I’m the people, and it’s not what I want. Give me something unexpected, something I wouldn’t have chosen myself. Challenge me, even on the journey home. If nothing else it will keep me awake, thus preventing me from becoming another road casualty statistic. And if I want the Final Bloody Countdown, I’ll stick it in the CD player.

It’s funny that while I myself remain heartily sick of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, Thomas appears to rather like it. Emily tells me that when she’s played A Night at the Opera he has grinned at the operatic interlude, and then laughed at May’s guitar solo (for the right reasons, I’m sure). It has led to more than one family singalong, with Mummy and Daddy bellowing out the counterpoint while Joshua sits in the back, bemused but thankfully still too young to be embarrassed. While we sometimes resort to this technique to get Daniel (who does not travel well) to stop screaming, it does provide sufficient enjoyment for me to almost start liking the song again, on a superficial level that is connected purely with live performance – albeit of a sort – rather than any admiration of the studio recording, and one which is thus relatively close to the ethos of The 17. Nonetheless, when I’m playing A Night At The Opera, I still finding myself jumping straight from track 10 to track 12. Baby steps, people. Baby steps.