lamb, scott

nervousacid:

Who’d have ever thought that a Leonard Cohen song would be vying for the number-one position on the UK charts in three different versions? The original, the classic Jeff Buckley take, and a recent mawkish version X Factor winner Alexandra Burke are all poised to chart, with Buckley and Burke battling it out for the two top spots. You probably don’t need Scooby Doo to figure out which version I prefer, although it certainly makes my heart warm to see Cohen with a hit single in any form. And the songwriter’s purport — still relevant and certainly time-appropriate — is practically its own gospel:

This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled but there are moments when we can transcend the dualistic system and reconcile and embrace the whole mess and that’s what I mean by “Hallelujah.” That regardless of what the impossibility of the situation is, there is a moment when you open your mouth and you throw open your arms and you embrace the thing and you just say “Hallelujah! Blessed is the name.” And you can’t reconcile it in any other way except in that position of total surrender, total affirmation.

That’s what it’s all about. It says that none of this — you’re not going to be able to work this thing out, you’re not going to be able to set, this realm does not admit to revolution, there’s no solution to this mess. The only moment that you can live here comfortably in these absolutely irreconcilable conflicts is in this moment when you embrace it all and you say “Look, I don’t understand a fucking thing at all — Hallelujah!” That’s the only moment that we live here fully as human beings.

The number of cover versions this song has enjoyed is simply stunning. What is it about “I don’t understand a fucking thing at all” that draws them all in?

This is from the March 2003 Atlantic. I hadn’t seen it before, but now I have, thanks to Spiers. The Introverts’ Rights Movement seems like a tumblelog someone should start:

The worst of it is that extroverts have no idea of the torment they put us through. Sometimes, as we gasp for air amid the fog of their 98-percent-content-free talk, we wonder if extroverts even bother to listen to themselves. Still, we endure stoically, because the etiquette books—written, no doubt, by extroverts—regard declining to banter as rude and gaps in conversation as awkward. We can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts’ Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say “I’m an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush.”