Choosing songs for your wedding dance can be perilous.
You’re kind of marrying the song, as well. You’re wedding your identity to it. This is who we are.
The one thing you want to avoid is selecting music that secretly undermines your union.
‘Every Breath You Take’ is probably the most famous trap: a stalker’s manifesto frequently misread as an expression of undying devotion.
Worse than choosing a musical Trojan Horse would be to pick a song that was outright satirical. One that poked fun at the very profession of romantic love. You absolutely have to mean it, and the singer has to mean it too.
But satirical songs can be surprisingly difficult to spot, even when the subject is marriage itself.
Archie, Marry Me
A case in point: ‘Archie, Marry Me,’ a 2014 sleeper hit by Alvvays, which many people have read as a bittersweet love song that celebrates commitment in the face of financial adversity.
I was one of those blissfully ignorant listeners, until I started digging around.
Rolling Stone identifies the song as a satire. Lead singer Molly Rankin described it as “more of an anti-marriage statement than a pining necessity of getting hitched”.
For those of us who took the song at face value, her words did offer a little qualification:
Two kids without any direction, doing it on a whim in a courthouse, saying ‘Who cares?’ to everyone else who has all of their ducks in a row before settling down. It was the most romantic thing I could think of at the time.
Yet even if Archie’s lover sincerely means what she says, it doesn’t seem like we’re supposed to get caught up in her plans.
This song wasn’t designed to be played at an indie wedding, as guests danced amid the mason jars and fairy lights. But as some commentators have noted, it isn’t difficult to imagine that very scenario coming true – it may already have happened.
And would that be a bad thing?
Reckless and romantic
Here’s the rub: despite understanding the song’s ironic origins, I still felt a slight lump in my throat when I tried to explain its titanic appeal to my wife.
First impressions count. I couldn’t shake the romantic ideal: a young woman striving to persuade a recalcitrant lover to share her vision.
Early marriage felt impossible felt like the act of a bygone age, like running away with the fair
She seems sure that her heartfelt intervention can work. She has both the financial data and the beguiling wordplay to back it up: ‘So honey take me by the hand and we can sign some papers / forget the invitations, floral arrangements and bread makers’
‘Archie, Marry Me’ brought me back to an earlier conception of young marriage: a kind of courageous doubling down.
At a party in my late teens I was briefly reunited with a former classmate, who had recently gotten married. I regarded her – and her equally young husband – with a blend of fascination and disbelief. My was already on a different path.
Premature marriage felt like the act of a bygone age – impossibly reckless and romantic, like running away with the fair. (Another member of my year group did run away with the fair, according to classroom gossip.)
Rankin’s peroration has the same giddy oh-what-the-hell quality to it. With its vintage references – including a subject whose name evokes chipper romanticism – it seems to call back to an era where marriage on the cusp of your twenties was the norm.
Even now, I cannot truly metabolise the song as a satire.
But I’m not alone in that. Many reviewers seem to split the difference too.
But seriously…
Satirical songs like ‘Archie, Marry Me’ are undeniably perilous for critics, who have to hedge their bets when assessing the content.
But there are significant pitfalls lurking for the songwriter too. Not the least of which is that they’ll be taken seriously, and people really will choose ‘Archie, Marry Me’ for their first dance.
The Beastie Boys were transformed into the frat boys they set out to mock
In the late 1990s, Mercury Prize-winners Gomez were aghast that some fans believed their seven-minute pastiche ‘Tijuana Lady’ was a sincere exploration of unrequited love on the Pacific coast.
“Because it’s a serious piss-take, you have to play it straight,” lead singer Ben Ottewell told Select magazine in 1999. “What raises it above being just a love song is it confuses people. It forces you to have a response.”
Gomez were a Southport-based band specialising in roots rock. You might argue that they were always likely to trip up their audience with additional genre excursions.
But if the misreading of ‘Tijuana Lady’ was largely harmless, the same can’t be said for the Beastie Boys’ 1987 single ‘(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!)’. The irony of that counterfeit party anthem was totally lost on large swathes of a susceptible audience.
Eventually the band were transformed by audience desire into exactly the kind of louts whom they’d set out to mock.
Only joking
In those instances, the initial intentions behind the songs were reasonably clear. Things get messier if there’s any uncertainty about how an audience is supposed to receive the work.
Take The Jam’s penultimate single, ‘The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had to Swallow)’.
I read somewhere that the song was meant to be a pastiche. Yet no one commenting on the winkingly melodramatic video seems to share that impression.
If it was intended as a send-up, then the band may have done their job too well. The feather-light strings and deft Smokey Robinson couplets make it virtually indistinguishable from a sincere ballad.
Later that year Paul Weller formed The Style Council, a project whose visuals and soulful output generated even greater cognitive dissonance. Observing Weller in that transitional period gives me the same feeling I had when watching the comedian Stewart Lee back during his 2013 tour.
Early in his set he delivered a broad Live at the Apollo-style gag about first encounters with smutty magazines, before pausing and acknowledging that the material was an awkward fit for his stage persona.
“It’s a good joke that, but it’s not like something would do, really…” Lee mused. But of course, he’d just done it.
The moment of deconstruction generated a flicker of unease in the crowd. Is this real? Were we supposed to laugh? Is the joke on us?
Tension and release
Popular convention would suggest that, if there’s one occasion where this kind of metahumour is unwelcome, it’s a wedding.
A wedding party is the zone of utter sincerity. It’s the place where all sentiments are unambiguous and no irony can be brooked. Even with the writer’s tacit blessing, few people would be comfortable playing a subversive song on their Big Day.
Yet arguably, I’m part of that oddball minority. ‘Pumped Up Kicks’ was the first dance at my wedding. It’s a song that – beneath its peppy exterior – is every bit as sinister as ‘Every Breath You Take’.
My wife and I knew this, but very few of our guests would have shared the context. I imagine the full story was lost on many of the millions of people who made the single into a hit.
We felt the song was broad enough to contain both constitutional subversiveness and a personal investment of joy and good humour.
To fill the dancefloor afterwards, we played ‘Let’s Dance.’ Another mainstream megahit that nonetheless manages to smuggle in gestures toward panic and equivocation.
It probably goes without saying that I enjoy the ambiguities and the complexities nested within these two songs.
Like ‘Marry Me, Archie,’ and ‘The Bitterest Pill’, they generate a pleasing creative tension. Even as they inflate you with emotion, you have the sense that they’re sharp enough to burst the bubble. For me, that’s something worth celebrating. It shouldn’t mean they’re off limits on your Big Day.
Some songs, like some marriages, are complex and contradictory. And as with a marriage, you just need to know what you’re getting yourself into.
