A Cold and a Broken Hallelujah

A Cold and a Broken Hallelujah

By Bobby Neal Winters

Leonard Cohen passed away in 2016 at the age of 82.  He was a tremendous song writer who wrote a couple of my favorite songs, but I’d never heard of him until years later.  It’s not that he didn’t record songs himself, but other people recorded his songs too and struck gold with them.

Other people were more successful in interpreting his songs than he was.  Don Henley and Sigrid somehow rendered more popular interpretations of “Everybody Knows” than he did.  Rufus Wright and Jeff Buckley had better interpretations of “Hallelujah” than he did.

Interpretation is an underrated gift.  I mean interpretation in art here not interpretation in language as you might think about it, but that is a good analogy.

The model of communication is simple.  The artist has a box of symbols; the interpreter has a box of symbols, not necessarily the same ones; and the artist sends his symbols to the interpreter over a channel that might have some noise in it.  Let’s ignore the noise because it will distract us from the point; it would be noise, as it were.

Think of it as the artist is trying to transmit a picture of something he sees to the interpreter.  He puts together a picture with some puzzle pieces that he has.  He sends the names of the puzzle pieces to the interpreter.  The interpreter picks out the puzzle pieces from his collection that he believes corresponds to the ones the artist sent.  

There is a subtle point here, so I am going to try to be careful.  The picture that the interpreter puts together may never look exactly like the one that the artist sent.  The interpreter’s puzzle pieces are either going to be bigger, smaller, or shaped differently.  But...

But the picture the interpreter puts may in fact look more like what the artist saw than the picture the artist put together.

This can happen in a number of ways.  The interpreter and the artist live in the same reality.  They craft their symbols, their puzzle pieces from that same reality.  The interpreter may have a more refined set of symbols than the artist has.  

This happens when the artist looks in a particular direction and sees something that no one has seen.  His message causes the interpreter to look in that same direction.  The interpreter then resends the message with his own set of symbols.

Johnny Cash was very good at this.  It is well known that he interpreted the Nine Inch Nails song “Hurt” and owned it thereafter.  Cash had an amazing set of tools for this, especially when he recorded it. His voice was aged to perfection.  But this was magnified through the lens of Cash’s gigantic personna. We knew Johnny; we heard Johnny’ we believed Johnny.

Sometimes the relationship of the interpreter to the artist is like that of the merchant to the explorer.  The explorer goes to the islands on the other side of the world and brings back the exotic spices.  The merchant tastes the spices; feels the heat; and uses his tools to make them into a product.  Elvis was a merchant and Chuck Berry was the explorer for “Johnny B. Goode.”

This is a good place to mention Jimi Hendrix and “All Along the Watchtower.”  

“All Along the Watchtower” was written by Bob Dylan. But after Jimi Hendrix sang it, it became his.  He owned it; Dylan has said this himself. In the manner of Johnny Cash his skills and personna combined to bring it to another level.  But Hendrix also took the song from Dylan’s Folk market to the Rock market.  He was able to reach people Dylan was not.  

Sometimes, and this is much rarer than what I described above, the interpreter takes what the artist did to a completely different place.  He finds something within the message the artist sent a deeper truth than the artist himself knew.  He raises what the original artist did to a higher level of abstraction.  This is something the best preachers do in their sermons.  

They take life illustrations and raise them to a higher level.  As fewer people go to church and even fewer listen to sermons, there will be less and less of this.  I wonder what effect it will have on our culture.

In any case, thank God for the Artist and also for the interpreter.

Amen and amen.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )