24 April 2014
It’s been a good few years since I was at a wedding – not that I’m complaining. After all, if I want to spent hours sitting on a wooden bench watching some unlucky sap in a cheap suit stand at the top of the room and wait nervously for a weird old man in a robe to condemn him to a lifelong sentence, just so I can get a free meal afterwards, there’s always jury duty. Nor have I had to undergo the ordeal myself; should I find myself at risk of being wedded, I’ll plea-bargain to be married in absentia.
Anyway, probability and demographics suggest there’s a fair chance you’ve been married off, or have sought planning permission for same. I mention it here because John Legend’s ‘All Of Me’ tends to crop up on various lists of the most popular wedding songs, be it for the march down the aisle, the first dance, or maybe even the wedding night. It has the requisite performative sentimentality, plus it’s slow enough for even an Irish groom to shuffle through a first dance. So far, so Westlife. If this is what you want as the soundtrack to at least one of your weddings, fair enough. It does the job.
Where ‘All Of Me’ raises my hackles, though, is in its dreadful chorus lyric about “all your perfect imperfections”. This is a song written by Legend for his high-profile nuptials with supermodel Chrissy Teigen, which therefore makes that lyric—already meaningless, simpering guff—just another iteration of the rotten trope (also topping our charts not long before this on 5 Seconds Of Summer’s ‘She Looks So Perfect’) where a man quantifies a woman’s value in terms of perfection. I’ve not heard a lyric that creepy since the high ol’ days of Chris De Burgh. Also: dude! You’re saying in front of the whole congregation that your bride is full of imperfections! Riddled with ’em! And on her big day! Will you be having the beef, the salmon, or the hospital food?
So, there’s an uncomfortable vibe of Groomzilla off ‘All Of Me’. Personally, I’d sooner walk down the aisle with my newly-wed to the sound of the Laurel and Hardy theme, which may explain some things.
