Rufus Wainwright called Trump out for using ‘Hallelujah’ — and showed he doesn’t know what the song means either
Cohen’s masterpiece is not an ‘ode to tolerance’
At a town hall rally, Trump swayed to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
By PJ Grisar October 16, 2024
Donald Trump’s rally playlist is, in a word, eclectic.
Well before his impromptu dance party at a campaign event Monday, the former president was keen to play “Memory” from Cats, “Tiny Dancer” by Elton John and, until a cease and desist from John Fogerty, “Fortunate Son” (I bet Trump thought that song, a polemic against rich kids who dodged service in Vietnam, wasn’t about him).
But then there’s the case of “Hallelujah.”
In a surreal moment in the more than 30-minute music break, which featured such disparate needle drops as Ave Maria, “Nothing Compares 2 U” and “Y.M.C.A.,” Trump could be seen caressing a chair as Rufus Wainwright’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s song — you may know it from the soundtrack of Shrek — piped through the venue.
Trump, like virtually everyone else, has used “Hallelujah” before, twice at the 2020 Republican National Convention, once performed live by a tenor from Long Island and another time by American Idol star Tori Kelly during the fireworks display, which prompted Cohen’s estate to say they declined the RNC’s request and were “dismayed” to learn they played it anyway.
Cohen, who died shortly before Trump’s election in 2016, and so missed his song’s rendition in a bizarre SNL cold open, at the RNC, and in a solemn pre-inauguration tribute mourning Americans lost to COVID-19, is not around to censure The Donald for misusing his song. But Wainwright is — and, curiously, he too seems to not understand the meaning of Cohen’s words.
“The song ‘Hallelujah’ by Leonard Cohen has become an anthem dedicated to peace, love and acceptance of the truth,” Wainwright, who, incidentally, is the father of one of Cohen’s grandchildren, said on Instagram and, later, in an MSNBC interview.
Well, he isn’t wrong that it has become that, along with a lot of other things. Somehow via oversaturation, which I’ve detailed previously, the tune has become a kind of secular hymn — and sometimes a religious one. Movingly, it helped Brandi Carlile reconcile her faith and sexuality. It had a memorable turn on The West Wing. It’s played at weddings and funerals, but it has become almost completely divorced from its actual lyrical content.
There are, to be sure, multiple iterations of the lyrics for “Hallelujah.” Cohen experimented with different verses and is said to have written between 80 to 180 drafts before debuting it on his 1984 album Various Positions. (Other artists have since picked up the scrapped verses, following the example of John Cale, who actually had Cohen fax him pages of his unused material for his cover.)
Cohen’s version borrows from the biblical stories of David and Samson and Delilah, expresses concepts from Lurianic Kabbalah and wrestles with the tension between the sacred and profane — “the holy and the broken Hallelujah.” It’s about doubt and personal deficiency and ends with the speaker surrendering, in glorious confusion and praise, to the “Lord of Song.”
While allowing for a certain amount of interpretation, Wainwright’s plaintive cut is more straightforwardly about sex (“tied you to a kitchen chair/broke your throne and cut your hair”), a failed relationship (“love is not a victory march”) whose cracks are showing after an initial, carnal openness (“there was a time you’d let me know what’s real and going on below”) and questioning the existence of the divinity (“maybe there’s a God above”).
It is not, as Wainwright contends, an “ode to tolerance,” nice as that sentiment may be. Honestly, “Y.M.C.A.” is far more inclusive (“you can do whatever you feel!”).
In the MSNBC interview, Wainwright came closer, when he said he saw in footage of Trump “a broken man” who “needs help and is expressing some kind of yearning maybe for redemption” that spoke to the song’s greater meaning.
I get Wainwright’s frustrations when he wrote that “witnessing Trump and his supporters commune with this music last night was the height of blasphemy.” But the time for insisting on the sacrosanctity of “Hallelujah” should have come decades ago, before it was converted to an “Easter version” about the Passion of Jesus Christ, was paired with Sir-Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” or sung in a karaoke app by disgraced congressman George Santos.
Granted, Trump’s rally was a bit more high profile and speaks to a kind of politics Cohen would find objectionable. But when Wainwright says, “perhaps in inhabiting and really listening to the lyrics of Cohen’s masterpiece, Donald Trump just might experience a hint of remorse over what he’s caused,” he’s just showing that he hasn’t really considered the lyrics himself.
While the song expresses some complicated thoughts, were Trump to take a moment to absorb Cohen’s words, he may end up with the same takeaway he did with his favorite film, Citizen Kane, another work he seems to have completely missed the point of.
As Trump told Errol Morris, he believes Citizen Kane is about a man who chose the wrong woman. In a crass, simplistic, but oddly accurate way, that is a completely valid reading of “Hallelujah.”
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