The Hallelujah Effect: Philosophical Reflections on Music, Performance Practice, and Technology by Babette Babich (review)

‘[E]ven if one does not follow this book to its conclusion, one should at least keep in mind from the start that it is Nietzsche’s extraordinary and complex conception of the becoming-human of dissonance that drives this exploration of the Hallelujah effect. Hence Nietzsche’s conception of the becoming-human of dissonance is present from the start, at least conceptually, as it must be in a text that begins with a study of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah sung by k.d. lang, together with an analysis of its dissemination on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter’ (p. 16).

Let me say this at the outset: Babette Babich’s new book, The Hallelujah Effect: Philosophical Reflections on Music, Performance Practice, and Technology, published as part of Ashgate’s Popular and Folk Music series, drastically needed editing. The above lines come from what should be a key passage towards the end of the preface. It is the passage that should have served to outline and justify the relationship between the two main sections of the work, with their markedly different foci on the media-cultural fate of Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah (1984) and Nietzsche’s musings on Greek tragedy. But like so many should-be-key passages in the text, it asserts a link without clarifying its nature. Arguments dissipate into so many clauses snaking around so many topics and interlocutors: ‘The literal Hallelujah effect, as engendered by [John] Cale’s cover, exemplifies Hillel Schartz’s [sic] notion, as Robert Fink’s also appropriates this for musicology, as [Erik] Steinskog also quotes Fink of the “culture of the copy”, of American culture’ (p. 81); ‘If one writes, as [Bryan] Appleyard, [Michael] Barthel, and others write, about Cohen’s Hallelujah, they’ll be damned, this is homophobia, but it is also more generically female-phobic, if they write about k.d. lang’ (p. 89). These are not isolated examples of malformed sentences (if anything, they are uncharacteristically short). But neither can The Hallelujah Effect’s problems be reduced to this kind of slipshod prose. Throughout, the author fails to gather up the many threads of her arguments and to draw explicit conclusions.

The book has three sections. The first discusses the ‘Hallelujah effect’, which Babich relates to a k.d. lang performance of Cohen’s song, the subversive erotic potential of that performance, and its imbrication within a normative, dollar-chasing music industry. The second section insists on the continued relevance of Theodor W. Adorno’s critical accounts of the Culture Industry and of the degradation of musical experience through its modern technological mediation. The third speaks to Nietzsche’s thinking on music in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), the significance of Beethoven for the philosopher, and Nietzsche’s phrase ‘the becoming-human of dissonance’. Scant reference to the early ‘Hallelujah effect’ material is made in the later parts of the book. And yet despite noting Nietzsche’s warning that an ‘enormous chasm’ separates modern culture from that of antiquity, Babich’s proposal turns out to be that k.d. lang’s ‘performance practice’ might lend insight into the function of Ancient Greek tragedy (pp. 212, 246). This, to my mind, comes as ill advice and my sense is that had she reversed the order of her book—starting with Nietzsche and then Adorno—she might have been better able to draw out the complexities and stakes of the contemporary ‘Hallelujah effect’ material, not for the sake of insight into Greek tragedy, but for its own sake.

Starting with Nietzsche would mean starting with questions; questions, moreover, that are highly abstract and both historical and anthropological. Babich maintains that Nietzsche scholarship has neglected The Birth of Tragedy and its continuity with his subsequent philosophical work. She also maintains that the significance Beethoven held for the philosopher, particularly in that work...