and he's going to be my wife
Mar. 28th, 2010 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cadenzamuse posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
earwormholeSo. 69 Love Songs is an album by The Magnetic Fields which is about what you would expect given the title: irreverent, sarcastic, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes sweet love songs that are a mixture of elegant and slapdash. I have a handful of favorites, but one of the ones that both a)keeps getting stuck in my head (always a requirement for this community) and b)I want to tell the whole wide world about is "When My Boy Walks Down the Street." Upbeat, airy, and just a little fierce love song? Oh, yes please. And did I mention it's [spoiler]? :-P
(lyrics)
The word "wife" just freaking makes. this. song. Because up until you get to that lyric, you're either thinking, "Aww, sweet queer love song" (if you've ever heard of Stephin Merritt, or you are queer, or your brain works in those sorts of ways) or "Aww, sweet love song; guess they must be rotating through the singers for variety" and then you hit "and he's going to be my wife" and all of a sudden you can't ignore that the singer/songwriter is doing it all on purpose.
And more than that, you suddenly have a hundred evocative, non-heteronormative love stories scrambling through your head that weren't there before. Is the boy genderqueer or transgender in some way? Is the speaker and the boy's relationship based on performative gender roles? Is the speaker just being silly in his exhuberance? Is he poking fun at heteronormative assumptions of marital roles? (Is it [E.]All of the above? :D )
I'd also really love to find a cover of this sung by a female vocalist, because :D :D :D awesomesauce. And either way, I keep imagining that it would be a great song to play at a wedding reception, because I am heavy-handed that way. (If I were to someday marry a good-humored, feminist man, I would totally find a way to dance to this song. Not the first dance, though. That honor would belong to another 69 Love Songs song, "Nothing Matters When We're Dancing" [lyrics].)
(lyrics)
The word "wife" just freaking makes. this. song. Because up until you get to that lyric, you're either thinking, "Aww, sweet queer love song" (if you've ever heard of Stephin Merritt, or you are queer, or your brain works in those sorts of ways) or "Aww, sweet love song; guess they must be rotating through the singers for variety" and then you hit "and he's going to be my wife" and all of a sudden you can't ignore that the singer/songwriter is doing it all on purpose.
And more than that, you suddenly have a hundred evocative, non-heteronormative love stories scrambling through your head that weren't there before. Is the boy genderqueer or transgender in some way? Is the speaker and the boy's relationship based on performative gender roles? Is the speaker just being silly in his exhuberance? Is he poking fun at heteronormative assumptions of marital roles? (Is it [E.]All of the above? :D )
I'd also really love to find a cover of this sung by a female vocalist, because :D :D :D awesomesauce. And either way, I keep imagining that it would be a great song to play at a wedding reception, because I am heavy-handed that way. (If I were to someday marry a good-humored, feminist man, I would totally find a way to dance to this song. Not the first dance, though. That honor would belong to another 69 Love Songs song, "Nothing Matters When We're Dancing" [lyrics].)
