Phil Christman

I’ll be posting it in groups of ten. Unfortunately I have to go off of an earlier draft of the playlist, because, in the madness (most of you were there), the discs got lost, and a computer emergency the following week wiped out the actual playlist, on which I had been working on and off for most of the past year.

1. Our first dance was to Andy Martinez’s recording of the jazz standard “Drifting.” In terms of choosing a first dance, it’s really helpful to have your friends go all 3AM-piano-bar on you.

Other, rejected candidates include Otis Redding’s fiery take on “I Love You More Than Words Can Say”:

2. Malo, “Suavecito”

A shout-out to Ashley’s Border childhood. I really wanted Tom Waits’s “Come On Up to the House” here, but Tom scares my wife when he gets shouty.

3. The Temptations, “What Love Has Joined Together”

From its saucy nod to the language of wedding ceremonies (“What love has joined together”—i.e., we’ll worry about Heaven later) to its vintage Smokey Robinson metaphorical conceits, this song clearly intends to be aisle music. The Episcopal Church wouldn’t let us get away with that, but we put it right at the head of the playlist as consolation. (To ourselves.)

4. The Go-Betweens, “Bachelor Kisses”

Does 1984 offer us any other example of music (in any genre) that still sounds so completely independent of its period? No sooner do the keyboards put us somewhere in the post-punk era than Grant McLennan’s singing—muted, soulful—takes us out of it again. So does the maturity, the richly layered indecisiveness of the lyrics, which, more than anything else, is what kept this group’s endlessly listenable compositions out of the top 40. The Go-Betweens, like marriage, demand a certain emotional maturity. At least an attempt at it.

5. Over the Rhine, “And Can It Be”

This is from OtR’s self-described “post-nuclear pseudo-alternative folk-tinged art-pop” period. That is, the period when they looked and talked like 10,000 Maniacs and The Church and the innocence mission and every other late-’80s indie-lite English-major band desperate for a spot on “120 Minutes” … and sounded like no one on earth. Nowadays they give the impression of being happy, settled people, and their cheery country songs make me want to kill myself. (Hint: When you have to say, out loud, “I don’t want to waste your time/With music you don’t need,” it’s a safe bet you’ve already done so.) But the Over the Rhine of 1991-1996 is still my favorite band.

6. Thomas Mapfumo and Blacks Unlimited, “Munhu Mutema (Black People)”

Here’s where the fast dancing was supposed to start. (Thanks again, Calvin The Sexton, for routing the food line straight through the dance floor. And for not letting us turn the music on and off as desired. And for kicking us out of the church with fifteen minutes’ notice.) Thomas Mapfumo was a folk hero of the Zimbabwean revolution, kicked out of the country both before and after independence, and this is one of his most defiantly joyous anthems. The album to get is Chimurenga Singles, released in 1984 by Shanachie, and out of print since probably before I knew what CDs were. I paid forty bucks for mine. A bargain at twice the price.

Ashley and I saw him at Duke this past spring and about peed ourselves.

7. Stevie Wonder, “Sugar”

Russell Gersten writes of this song: “It begins with two stanzas, punctuated by a chorus of ‘Sugar, I want to be your main boy.’ Then comes the astounding third stanza—language is stripped away. Stevie and the girls sing ‘oo-sha-ya’ and the horns and drums come to a hair-raising climax. It is as close to hearing a soul speak directly as vocal music is likely to get.”

8. Modern English, “I Melt With You”

Swirling keyboards. Drum machines. Nuclear anxiety (“I made a pilgrimage to save this human’s race”). A skinny singer in a cop hat. Guitars so treated you can’t tell where they end and the synths begin. THIS SONG IS THE PLATONIC FORM OF NEW WAVE.

9. Celia Cruz, “Caramelo”

I was gonna try to mambo here. Unfortunately I never got past the part of the instructional DVD where she tells you how Dance is the Language of Bodies.

10. Wire, “Three Girl Rhumba”

The idea was that there would be actual rhumba-ing. To a Wire song. That’s the sort of movie that plays in my head and makes me snicker.

Even if you’re not trying to please that imaginary constituency that supposedly desires to hear just one more replay of “December, 1963″ or the “Chicken Dance” (who are these people? Are they real?), you find yourself indulging in fits of self-censorship and subsequent overcorrection. Thus the following five songs have both disappeared from and reappeared on the wedding dance playlist at least three times in the past several months:

Yes, Sun Ra, I do find earth boring! Is there a program for people like me?

One of the greatest ballads of the New Wave era. But how much do I want a song about Costello’s own adultery to be played at my own repudiation of same (“forsaking all others”)?

This song is gorgeous, all-embracing, cosmic. It also contains the lines “Your mom would drink until she was no longer speaking/And dad would throw the garbage all across the floor.” A verse later, the same dad (presumably) is dreaming “of all the different ways to die.” Hmm.

Richard Hell’s punk classic “Blank Generation” isn’t especially joyful, but its ferocious energy, surprisingly inventive drumming, and Ivan “Build Me Up, Buttercup” Julian’s bass ingeniousness (yes, he was a member of the Foundations before he was a punk) make it supremely joyful to jump around to. For some of us. Maybe.

The Juice reference halfway through this up-with-black-people anthem (“Now it could be Dr. Ralph Bunche/Or Robert Hayes/O.J. Simpson/Or Willie Mays …”) kind of reduces the “up” factor, and a white male’s enthusiasm for such a hopelessly dated, ramshackle production has every chance of being mistaken for condescension (which it isn’t. I don’t think). Too bad, because this song just puts me in the best mood.