Songs on repeat: Olympics platform sparks play for melody gamechangers

Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen wrote some great songs ‘but Hallelujah is definitely not one of them’. Picture: AFP

Imagine an Olympic opening ceremony without the song Imagine.

It’s easy if you try.

Our world – its stadium events, its media specials, its tributes, its funerals even – defaults to a handful of puzzlingly untouchable anthems that write themselves into programs despite odd or irrelevant lyrics and dirge-like melodies.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that we should favour, without much reflection, stagy songs for public stages.

John Lennon’s Imagine has become a go-to anthems for everything from the Olympics to TV talent shows.

John Lennon wrote Imagine in 1971. Stevie Wonder sang it at the closing ceremony for the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996, and it has been used at most official Olympic platforms ever since. French singer-songwriter Juliette Armanet performed it at the Paris opening ceremony a week ago.

“Imagine there’s no countries”? Then best pack up and head home. For the core goal of the 11,000 athletes competing in the Games is of course to win medals for their 206 states. The meaning of the modern Olympics is inseparable from the parading around of flags, jingoistic sloganeering and obsessing about the medals tally.

Lennon generally claimed an undefinably “spiritual” ethos, a “dreamer” without commitment to religion but who struggled with imagining no possessions, his wealth valued at around $US200m when he was murdered in 1980.

It’s debatable whether genuinely “livin’ for today” would contribute to or diminish the prospect of world peace.

When Lennon sang “I hope someday you’ll join us/And the world will be as one”, he seems to have somehow forgotten that the world had already joined him “as one” – in loving the Beatles, whom he had quit two years earlier.

Pianist Sofiane Pamart and Juliette Armanet perform during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games Paris 2024. Picture: Alex Pantling/Getty Images

His song was played, inevitably, when the Winter Olympics in Beijing in 2022 were formally launched by China’s paramount ruler Xi Jinping, who has proclaimed: “The love for one’s motherland is the deepest and most enduring sentiment in the world.”

Polish television journalist Przemyslaw Babiarz – who, until he was 26, lived entirely under a harsh, unelected communist government – was suspended by the state broadcaster that employs him after he lamented from grim experience during Armanet’s performance of Imagine a week ago: “This is a vision of communism, unfortunately.”

Paul McCartney has said his favourite Lennon piece is the brilliant and touching If I Fell.

Leonard Cohen, like Lennon, wrote some great songs. But Hallelujah is definitely not one of them.

Its portentous melody line and endlessly repeated chorus comprising solely of its title – Hebrew for “praise God” – have become a ubiquitous signal of faux-piety, sung at every TV Idol contest, memorial ceremonies such as the Covid service in Washington three years ago and naturally at an Olympics opening, with KD Lang singing it for the Winter Games in Vancouver in 2010.

American comedian Kate McKinnon sang Hallelujah with solemnity as a lament, dressed as Hillary Clinton, on the TV show Saturday Night Live the weekend after Clinton’s loss in the 2016 presidential election.

The song also was played repeatedly – if without authorisation from the estate of Cohen, who died in 2016 – during the last night of the Republican National Convention in 2020 that reaffirmed Donald Trump as presidential candidate.

The lyric actually dwells, as often with Cohen, on the dark side of sexual desire, around which he had special fun meeting the challenge of rhyming with Hallelujah, as he later explained: “do you”, “overthrew you”, “to you”, “fool you” – the last not working as well but all, of course, pronouncing “you” as “ya”.

Jeff Buckley, who died in 1971 aged just 30, and who had especial success with the song, described it as “a hallelujah to the orgasm”.

The usually poetic and downbeat Cohen vibe tends to wash over infelicities – mainly the result of rhyming demands – in his songs, for instance asserting “like a bird on the wire … I have tried in my way to be free”. That bird is not trying to be free. It is already free simply to fly away.

Cohen’s formal catalogue of 278 songs includes classic works such as Suzanne, who “takes you down to her place near the river”.

The incomparable Joni Mitchell especially loves Suzanne – “one of the greatest songs I ever heard”. For a time she loved Cohen, too. She wrote the wonderful, heart-tugging song Rainy Night House about spending a night at his family’s home, falling asleep in his old bedroom while he “sat up all night, and he watched me see who in the world I could be”, as she described and also lyricised.

How odd, then, that Cohen’s reputation should rather hinge on Hallelujah, the song gathering King David’s predation on Bathsheba – then murdering her husband – together with a fragment of the Samson and Delilah story and concluding with a touch of inconclusive and self-focused adolescent angst. This was the song salvaged in terms of mass awareness by its application in the first Shrek movie to denote sadness when the ogre and Princess Fiona part – as appropriate a use as at any funeral, or not.

It’s a “Praise God” by a secularised Jewish-turned-Zen artist, for a secular Western world that seeks a form of sanctification but can’t commit.

For those who can stomach more substantial faith fare, Amazing Grace has come to be a common default.

John Newton wrote the heartfelt words as part of his sermon for New Year’s Day 1773: “Amazing grace! How sweet the sound/That saved a wretch like me!/I once was lost, but now am found;/Was blind, but now I see.”

He was then in the solid role of curate-in-charge of the Anglican parish of St Peter and St Paul at Olney in Buckinghamshire, England. But his life before that had been turbulent and often hateful.

His father sent him, aged 17, to sea on a slave ship. Myriad adventures and misadventures followed, including being press-ganged and flogged and suffering starvation and near-death by drowning.

Newton knew well – as did King David – the darkness at the heart of every person. After Christian conversion he helped William Wilberforce form the Anti Slavery Society, and became an ardent and celebrated abolitionist. He wrote hundreds of hymns, including the magisterial Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken.

How unfortunate, then, that his personal account of redemption, Amazing Grace – often the sole representation of religion at public commemorations, and probably the best known of all hymns – should be saddled, on almost every occasion, with such a dire melody.

William Walker, an American Baptist, corralled a tune known as New Britain, of unknown origin, and adapted it to Newton’s words in 1835.

It is played by Scots bagpipers, it has been sung by Elvis Presley and Luciano Pavarotti and inevitably on X Factor shows.

Barack Obama, when US president in 2015, led the singing of it at the funeral of South Carolina state senator Clementa Pinckney, who was also the pastor of a church where he was shot with eight other people.

Amazing grace! Indeed. But no, not a sweet sound. The weight of the melody’s overuse has exposed its dreariness.

There’s a ready solution: Newton’s fine hymn works exceedingly well when sung to the tune of The House of the Rising Sun, a folk-blues song associated with New Orleans but dating back probably to older British roots.

The confessional sentiment of those lyrics adds to its suitability: “It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy/And God, I know I’m one”.

Imagine better songs and tunes for our great communal occasions. There are very many around. Hallelujah!