terça-feira, 27 de janeiro de 2009

Copiado da Blender.com, porque me dá na realissima gana

(sei que isto não é actualização que se apresente, que não ponho nada no blog há duas semanas, e que até teria coisas para dizer a respeito das ultimas duas semanas. No entanto, não me apetece de momento relatar os últimos acontecimentos, e de qualquer das maneiras um artigo sobre uma das melhores musicas de sempre vale por qualquer conjunto de asneiras que eu produza. Sendo assim, I give you "Hallelujah"!)



How the Canadian gloomster’s ode to all he couldn’t comprehend became a towering, spiritual anthem.






By 1984, Leonard Cohen had spent nearly 20 years beating his relationship traumas and existential aches into brooding folk songs. He’d won praise as a poet and novelist, released six acclaimed records, wooed a succession of famous femme fatales including Janis Joplin and Nico and established himself as the patron saint of clove-smoking, bohemian depressives everywhere—rock’s coolest Jew this side of Bob Dylan. And yet, writing songs proved a monumental pain in the tuchus.

Holed up in a New York hotel to work on his seventh album, Various Positions, Cohen struggled with one tune: “Hallelujah.” “I filled two notebooks with the song,” Cohen has said. “I remember being on the carpet of the Royalton in my underwear, banging my head on the floor, saying, ‘I can’t finish.’”

The song mixed biblical imagery with erotic impulses—a favorite cocktail for Cohen—as it tiptoed the line between salvation and despair. To Cohen, it was ultimately a celebration of powerlessness. “The world is full of things that cannot be reconciled,” he has said. “But there are moments when we can embrace the whole mess: ‘I don’t understand a fucking thing at all—Hallelujah!’” Recording in a Manhattan studio above a nudie bar called the Metropole (“The guy out front would always be trying to get us in to see the strippers,” recalls producer John Lissauer), Cohen traded his typical somber-dude-with-a-guitar arrangements for a Euro-tinged, cabaret-assman persona. Slick keyboards and a spare rhythm section lead Cohen’s grim baritone through the verses before the chorus opens up with a swell of backing singers. “He had just ­discovered the Casio keyboard,” Lissauer says. “Somebody had given it to him as a toy, but he found it so easy to write to.” The song came together smoothly—then almost disappeared entirely. After what Lissauer terms “a pissing match” with Cohen’s manager, the label refused to release Various Positions in the U.S. It finally appeared on shelves the following February.

Ever since, covers have proliferated. In 1994, Jeff Buckley released a version, which owed much to a somber read John Cale had recorded for a 1991 tribute collection. Cale’s cover drew wide attention when it sound­tracked the romantic yearnings of a large green ogre in 2001’s Shrek, but Buckley’s plaintive take has sunk deepest into the public consciousness. “I first fell for the Buckley version,” Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz tells Blender. Wentz was listening to the tune as he swallowed a handful of Ativan in a 2005 suicide attempt; he later quoted it in “Hum Hallelujah.” “It’s been one of my favorite songs for a long time. You can just sit in the dark and listen to it over and over.” TV shows like The O.C. and The West Wing have used “Hallelujah” to amplify the upheavals of the unreasonably attractive. And covers continue to crop up: Besides notable takes by Rufus Wainwright and Bono, the song was also reworked by American Idol finalist Jason Castro in 2008, subsequently boosting Buckley’s “Hallelujah” to a top slot on iTunes, and stripping the song of its “cult hit” status once and for all. “At this point, it’s a ­cliché,” says O.C. and Gossip Girl creator Josh Schwartz. “But in 10 years, somebody else will do an incredible version, and it will live on. It’s timeless.”




A melhor versão, não me importa o que digam, será sempre a do meu ídolo, Mr. Buckley.



Aqui fica:


Hallelujah - Jeff Buckley

3 comentários:

V. disse...

TRAIDORA! :P

R disse...

Nop... mas, assunto discutido :)

Anónimo disse...

Cohen! Cohen! Buuuuu Buuuuuu