14 August 2015
It only scraped to no. 21 in its home of America, so how come ‘Marvin Gaye’ by Charlie Puth and Meghan Trainor got to number one in the UK and in Ireland? I put it down to our shared taste for top, top banter – the Brits when it involves mild sauciness, we Irish when it involves being gas craic in social settings.
(Digression. ‘Marvin Gaye’ also topped the charts in my former home of France. The French don’t do bantz, but they’ve always loved US pop culture—such as the Glee-style high-school video and doo-wop vibe here—a lot more than they’ll admit. As it happens, the week it was number one in Ireland I was back in France on holiday, but I had left France by the time it was a hit there in October 2015. So, I was out of the country for what I imagine was Ireland’s ‘Marvin Gaye’-mania, and I have an alibi for both jurisdictions. Now read on.)
Anyway, yeah, this thing is dreadful. Its combination of chaste walk and sexy talk (“It’s Kama Sutra show and tell”) is teeth-grindingly ick. As with Trainor’s ‘All About The Bass’, the retro doo-wop sound may have been intended as a lark but comes across as the sort of white middle-class American trad-core fantasy even Hallmark Christmas movies would reject as being too conservative. I cringed all the way through this, but the embarrassment shouldn’t be mine: other people made it; other people bought it; other people used it as a pub or office party gag, possibly with the embellishment of finger-guns. The only way ‘Marvin Gaye’ could have wronged Marvin Gaye any more is if it had also featured his father.
