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"When Alexandra Burke sang &amp;#039;Hallejujah&amp;#039; on Saturday&amp;#039;s X Factor final, she joined an impressive list of artists who have covered Leonard Cohen&amp;#039;s 1984 classic. Bon Jovi brought their overblown stadium rock sound to the song, Bono gave it a bizarre trip-hop reworking and The Velvet Underground&amp;#039;s John Cale performed a moving rendition for a 1991 Cohen tribute record. However, the most famous - and, according to Cohen, definitive - version of &amp;#039;Hallelujah&amp;#039; is by the late Jeff Buckley. Appearing on his only complete studio album, Grace, it ditched Cohen&amp;#039;s chintzy eighties production and replaced it with sparse, ethereal-sounding guitar work and Buckley&amp;#039;s angelic, idiosyncratic vocals. It wasn&amp;#039;t the American&amp;#039;s finest moment, but it is his best-remembered. Consequently, it wasn&amp;#039;t surprising that followers of the Californian were up in arms when they heard Simon Cowell had picked the track for his latest X Factor victor. Although the line &amp;quot;you don&amp;#039;t really care for music, do you?&amp;quot; may seem strangely appropriate for the reality show judge, many fans declared it musical blasphemy that the likes of Eoghan Quigg could end up releasing a song which Buckley believed to be about the &amp;quot;hallelujah of an orgasm&amp;quot;.  Alexandra Burke, for her part, thinks the song is about &amp;quot;love&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;sexual positions&amp;quot;. She may have trouble justifying that when she&amp;#039;s singing the line about being tied &amp;quot;to her kitchen chair&amp;quot;, but her rendition is nowhere near as awful as it could have been. Its choir-heavy crescendo may grate on those who prefer their ballads with a modicum of subtlety, but perhaps the reason the song has become uch a modern classic is its malleability. Whether you think it&amp;#039;s about sex, romance, triumph, failure or something else entirely, the track&amp;#039;s hymnal beauty remains constant. While the Facebook campaigners and Buckley obsessives may not succeed in trumping Burke for the Christmas number one spot, they shouldn&amp;#039;t consider their efforts a total failure. Cowell Towers may have won the chart battle, but it is Cohen and the late Buckley who are the real winners, with millions of young fans hearing a great song performed by a great singer for the very first time. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/music/news/a138846/the-history-of-hallelujah/>