30 Day Song Challenge, Day 23: A Song You Want Played At Your Wedding

I got married 10 years ago this October, one month after I defended my dissertation, so I think that this question is more historical than speculative: there were songs played at my wedding…not like I remember what they were. We didn’t have a ceremony with music or anything. It was more or less: open the bar, have everyone gather around, say some things, eat and drink more and have some dancing. There was probably background music on during the eating and mingling part?

Christian and I spent A LOT of time putting a playlist together for the dancing part. We didn’t have a DJ, just a PA and my second-gen iPod. That said, I don’t really remember what was on that playlist anymore. (As common as it is at Midwest weddings, I am certain there was no chicken dance).

C made an iTunes playlist and we both dumped a ton of songs in it, and then he went through and put them in some sort of order. I do remember suggesting !!!’s “Pardon My Freedom” — I was really into that band at the time. However, its lyrics consist mostly of “Like I give a fuck, like I give a shit about this fuck,” and C reminded me that his grandmother was gonna be there, so, maybe I should think more about the lyrics in the songs I was suggesting. He had a good point. (Perhaps, though, something subconscious motivated that selection, because the first verse basically describes how it feels to be around my birth family, which is really super conservative.)

I can’t remember exactly what songs were on that playlist, but I have some pretty good guesses. The playlist was basically a combination of mid-00s dance-punk and Scary Lady Sarah’s DJ sets, so it must’ve had stuff like: Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” The Rapture’s “House of Jealous Lovers,” Gang of Four’s “To Hell With Poverty,” Ministry’s “Every Day Is Halloween,” the DFA remix of Le Tige’s “Deceptacon,” etc.

The one song I do remember being pretty insistent about including was A Certain Ratio’s “Shack Up,” which is basically a song about the conservative bourgeois politics of marriage as a legal institution. And I kinda needed that said somewhere at my own wedding. And it’s also a fantastic song–the bass groove under the angular, jangly post-punk guitars. Of all the Factory bands of that era, ACR were, I think, the most musically sophisticated.