An absolutely fascinating essay on the cultural history of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”:
If its use is becoming less common, that’s because its overuse has erased the line-by-line, verse-by-verse meaning and replaced it with an overall feeling of sadness. You hear those opening chords now and the words hardly matter. The visual emotions it was used to counterpoint have overtaken the lyrical content. This is the nature of tools–they are imprinted by their materials–and there’s nothing wrong with tools per se, but making a Matisse into a washcloth would erase some of the details, and Hallelujah’s overuse has had a similar effect.
In twenty-five years, Leonard Cohen has gone from a punchline on a TV show to a sideways joke mixed with a tribute in Nirvana’s “Pennyroyal Tea”–“give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld so I can sigh eternally”–to a totally serious starring role in a song by Fall Out Boy, a band not especially known for their irony. It seems like this has been accomplished by an emotional flattening–reducing a song about the varieties of grace to a mere lament. But this is not the only direction the song could have gone in. Something of Cohen’s defiance, sensuality, and triumph could just as easily inform a cover.
Of the versions of the song that I’ve heard, I think Jeff Buckley’s is still my personal favorite.
John Cale’s is the prettiest, but my favourite is the original.
But, of course, those are highly subjective statements.