Hallelujah
This is a great piece of work on Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah and its long, weird journey through 49072350 covers and 589073 TV shows and movies.
On Jeff Buckley's classic cover, which he argues (convincingly) came more from John Cale than from Cohen:
The effect was to flatten the song emotionally, to take out all the different Hallelujahs Cohen depicted and reduce them to one: the cold and broken, which appears here twice. Even the "you don't really care for music" dig sounds more wronged than cutting, and the sex is now the ecstasy of the brooding artiste, an image Cohen always seemed careful to subvert.This simplification resulted in a torrent of covers.
I happen to like the Cohen, Cale, and Buckley versions, albeit for different reasons. But Leonard's is the best. It always is.
(via kottke)