Last night at the wedding, DJ went around asking for song suggestions and I thought back about Serbian weddings and how many songs there are that are inappropriate for weddings there - so many songs are sad, melancholic romances about lost loves, about lives lost in alcohol after the only loved one got married to someone else. Heck, just a brief look at songs by Djordje Balasevic (aka George Nationale) reveals several of those, so I found a couple on YouTube and posted them under the fold for my Balkan readers - the lyrics are very difficult to translate as he loves to use localisms, archaisms and words and imagery that make sense only in the local context.
The first one is a clip from a movie made by a friend of mine Zoran Amar, which aired on Belgrade TV in the early 1980s and consisted entirely of clips of Djordje's songs. The others are from more recent concerts (wow - he's gotten old since I last saw him!). Of all the ex-Yugoslav artists, Djordje (with whom I apparently share the birthday) was the only one who had concerts during the 1990s (during all the wars) in all the ex-Yugoslav states: Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Macedonia...and in each of those places had thousands come and sing along - everyone over there knows every word of every song of his. I used to play all of his songs at parties. I made people cry singing the song from the second clip...certainly not for weddings!
Comments
I have two suggestions for songs that should not be sung at weddings. The first is Tina Turner's "What's love got to do with it?" and the second is Wham's "Wake me up before you go go."
Both of these songs were played by the DJ at my college roommate's wedding reception. The marriage didn't last out the year.
Posted by: Zeno | September 23, 2007 12:45 PM
Steely Dan's "Haitian Divorce" is a pretty sweet wedding song.
Posted by: Gebstadter | September 23, 2007 2:58 PM
Are we talking Serbia or Tennesse? I ask because some songs out of Nashville can be hard to translate because of localisms and archaic language.
Posted by: Alan Kellogg | September 23, 2007 10:27 PM
But you can hear country-music songs at weddings all the time...
Posted by: Warren | September 25, 2007 10:55 AM
Other wedding favorites that make little to no sense:
1) Chief offender number one: The Police, "Every Breath you Take." No, this is not a touching love song; this is Sting's obsessive stalker song about his ex.
2) Gloria Gaynor "I Will Survive." Similar problems to those above.
3) Meatloaf "Paradise by The Dashboard Lights."
Posted by: Brian | September 25, 2007 4:52 PM