30 Rock takes on the butchering of ‘Amazing Grace’

There were a number of amazing things about last night’s episode of ‘30 Rock’, and the show’s opening segment concentrated a lot of them.

But what really sent me into the cackles was the Jane Krakowski/Jenna Maroney character’s butchering of ‘Amazing Grace’ in this NBC town hall during the show’s first 2 minutes. Watch it below, and you’ll no longer be as angry as a bat trapped in a suitcase:

The bit got me thinking about Maura Johnston’s really cool blog post at Vanity Fair Daily regarding the overuse of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Halleleujah’, something that Amazing Grace also falls victim to:

Watching performances of “Hallelujah” by people who aren’t Cohen—whose original take has an archness that’s wiped away by the clear-eyed sincerity offered up by his successors—you see one common thread: each singer really feels the song, closing their eyes at least once in every performance to properly communicate that what they are singing is Serious Business. This despite the cut-and-paste nature of the covers, some of which elide the song’s more disturbing imagery (“She tied you to her kitchen chair / She broke your throne and she cut your hair”) in an effort to expedite the journey to the song’s hymn-like, catharsis-providing chorus.

Of course, then there was that ridiculous commercial from AT&T during the Winter Olympics with the snowboarder hurling out into space to Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’:

Yeah,if you go snowboarding in space, chances are that you’re hopped up on heroin in Central Park, too.