I’ve prepared a list of songs banned from My Big Fab Gay Wedding®. Most are on the list because they’re too gay-cliché (“I Will Survive”; “YMCA”), but some are on the list, well… because…
… playing something like “When A Man Loves A Woman” or even “The Wedding Song”[sup]*****[/sup] (Captain & Tennille) at a gay wedding would elicit snickers and what not, no matter how enlightened the guests.
[sup]*[/sup] Jeremy wanted to play that song, and I was all, “OK, sure.” Then I Googled the lyrics. In-ap-propriate!
The version I heard was recorded by the King’s Singers The first verse went something like this:
*If you want to be happy and lead a king life,
never make a pretty woman your wife –
All you gotta do is just what I say,
and you’ll be happy, merry and gay!
So from a logical point of view,
Marry a woman uglier than you!*
D.I.V.O.R.C.E. made me think of the knockoff from “Starlight Express” U.N.C.O.U.P.L.E.D.
Was I corroded or overloaded?
Maybe I shamed him, who could have blamed him
If he thought me second class, went in search of chrome and brass (whereupon every immediately substitutes “tits & ass.”).
The Georgia Satellites and I believe that was their one and only hit. When I got married a few years ago my wife asked me to compile a list of music I wanted played at the wedding. The first CD I submitted contained the following songs.
Evil Woman (ELO?)
Don’t Bring me Down (ELO?)
50 Ways to Leave Your Lover (Paul Simon)
I Hate Myself for Loving You (??)
Love Plus One (Haircut 100)
There were a few others I can’t remember off the top of my head but she was only partially amused at my little joke.
One that I hear a lot at weddings is Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered, the jazz standard. My wife wanted to use it as “our” song until I made her listen to the lyrics.
My friends used Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off. She is white and he is Indian, so it was pretty cute (and I suppose apropos).
Last week my brother went to a wedding of his African American friend to her white fiancee. For the first dance, the DJ announced he was playing the song that the bride’s father used to teach the bride to dance. My brother started laughing uncontrollably when he realized that the song was Procul Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale. I know the lyrics are about sea-sickness, but I mean, come on now…
There’s an indie artist called Lorna Vallings who did a steamy song called “Taste.” (It was in the Pacey movie The Skulls).
The song itself is not a “happy love song,” it’s not a “romantic” love song, infact it’s not a love song! It’s an angst-filled lust song! I read a live journal in which a woman said “my sister is going to sing it at my wedding!”
I was in a record store several years ago when I overheard a woman trying to find out the name of a song for the couple’s first dance at her daughter’s wedding. The clerk was coming up empty but I realized she was looking for “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips. Definitely not first dance material! But I’d have paid good money to see them dancing to such lyrics as “you’ve got no one to blame for your unhappiness / you got yourself into your own mess” and “don’t you know / things’ll change / things’ll go your way / if you hold on for one more day.”
