This question’s hard for me to express because my musical knowledge is not very strong.
Wikipedia says that Bus Stop came out in 1966 with the lyrics “Someday my name and hers Are going to be the same”, and I’m guessing that was already a bit late for lyrical mention of marriage. And the Hollies are classified as pop/rock.
What would you say was the last time when it was common in western, English-language music… of the sort aimed toward men as much as toward women… for marriage to come up in addition to love/sex? And what were some late, rare mentions?
I’m trying to exclude areas I’m not curious about – like when pop eventually meant Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey or whatever – and I don’t care what happened in country music, beyond… well, it could be somewhat interesting to know about shifts of their own… I just don’t know whether the term “rock” neatly covers what I’m trying to get at here. For that matter, if we do call it rock, I imagine marriage only started to come into it for little while when it first went mainstream with white audiences and had to become a bit…straight-laced.
All of Me by John Legend. Thinking Out Loud by Ed Sheeran. Marry You by Bruno Mars. These are more recent songs, though I have prefer the old classics. … There are going to be marriages at least as long as there are weddings, gowns, bridesmaids, showers, cakes and honeymoons. There are people you marry, and people you don’t. The songs are for them. There will always be songs about marriage.
John Denver, “Leaving on a Jet Plane”, 1969: “when I come back, I’ll wear your wedding ring…”
Your category choices seem a little weird, to say the least. If you’re interested in “western, English-language music of the sort aimed toward men as much as toward women”, then why are you excluding country? Or rap?
Is this a veiled way of asking “Does commercial music largely directed to a mainstream white male audience generally involve songs about marriage anymore?” ? That’s a reasonable question to ask, but I think you need to clarify that you’re asking it.
Anyway, do you count Ed Sheeran’s 2014 “Thinking Out Loud” (“And, darling, I will be loving you 'til we’re 70…” ) as a marriage-themed song?
2001 isn’t terribly recent, but the example that I was able to think of most quickly is from 2001 and the band is easily qualified as Rock so it seems to perfectly fit the OP’s parameters.
I thought of this thread this morning when I heard Jethro Tull’s “Too Old To Rock And Roll.” The song seems to view “married with three kids” as essentially a living death.
I just thought of another one, though I guess you might consider it country; Taylor Swift’s Love Story, which - and I’ll kill you if you tell anyone- makes me tear up every time.
