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Donald Trump's inauguration: Why 'My Way' was the wrong song

Sure, just pick your event's song on the basis of the title alone. How could that not work?

Music is a glorious, personal, subjective thing and there's literally no accounting for people and their terrible, terrible taste.

The world was reminded of this fact on Friday when new US President Donald Trump enjoyed an awkward dance with his First Lady Melania to the strains of My Way: a song sung from the perspective of a dying man making futile protests as he nears the grave. 

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President Trump, Melania share 'first dance'

US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania have their first dance to Frank Sinatra's "My Way" at the Liberty Ball.

You'd think someone in his team might have thought to point out that "And now, the end is near" wasn't perhaps the greatest opening line with which to serenade his nation – or perhaps they agreed that it was impressively on-message.

Trump's got a rich history of misunderstanding songs to hilarious effect (he briefly used Neil Young's savage Rockin' in the Free World as a campaign song without apparently noticing that it's about the people left behind by the ravages of capitalism), but he's not the first politician to half-arsedly listen to the chorus and go "yeah, that's probably fine" when choosing a tune.

Ronald Reagan was a huge fan of Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA in 1984 for its patriotic sounding shout-along chorus while apparently overlooking the much larger section of the song about working-class poverty and the States' horrendous neglect of returned veterans: "Down in the shadow of the penitentiary / Out by the gas fires of the refinery / I'm 10 years burning down the road / Nowhere to run, ain't got nowhere to go."

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel made a similarly ill-considered choice when using the Rolling Stones' plaintive Angie as a re-election campaign song in 2005, presumably thinking "With no loving in our souls, and no money in our coats / You can't say we're satisfied" sent exactly the right message to galvanise the electorate behind her. Mind you, it apparently worked: she's still their chancellor over a decade on.

My personal favourite weird choice, however, occurred in 2008 when Meaghan McCain – now a rising star of US conservative media punditry and then blogging the campaign of her father, Republican presidential candidate John McCain – let her election-trail followers know that her song of the day was Stereolab's Ping Pong. 

Her right-leaning audience may not have been completely across the UK-based indie band's hardcore Marxist background, but even so there's the uncomfortable fact that Ping Pong is unambiguously about capitalism using war to achieve economic ends ("Bigger slump and bigger wars and a smaller recovery / Huger slump and greater wars and a shallower recovery"). A toe-tappin' critique of her dad's campaign policies, in other words.

And then there's the super-geniuses of Reclaim Australia, who attempted to use Cold Chisel's Khe Sahn as the anthem for their anti-immigration rhetoric before being slapped down by the band.

What was it about the song that appealed so much to their white Australia rhetoric? Was it the depiction of a Vietnam veteran broken by post traumatic stress disorder? The bit on desperate sex with south-east Asian sex workers ("There ain't nothing like the kisses from a jaded Chinese princess / I'm gonna hit some Hong Kong mattress all night long")? Or was it the fact that it was sung by a Scots immigrant married to the daughter of a Thai diplomat? It's a mystery.

Weddings, however, are the best place to find breathtakingly poor song choices.

Some favourites include the Dolly Parton/Whitney Houston classic I Will Always Love You (which is about breaking up), the Police's Every Breath You Take (which is about being a stalker), Marry You by Bruno Mars (which is about getting hitched for a joke), Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On (which is about pining for a dead love) and Percy Sledge's classic When A Man Loves A Woman (which contains the perky lines "she can bring him such misery… If she's playing him for a fool, he's the last to know"). 

U2's elegant One has also turned into a wedding standard, because nothing says eternal happiness like a bitter song about a toxic relationship that asks "Did I ask too much, more than a lot / You gave me nothing, now it's all I got" before conceding "we hurt each other, then we do it again". Mazel tov!

Even classical music can be a minefield. Verdi's stirring La donna e mobile might seem a lovely and inspiring choice, were it not that the translation approximates "Anyone who trusts her is always wretched / he who opens his heart to her is lacking in caution".

Is there a solution to this issue, aside from giving more than a second's thought to one's song choice? Thankfully, yes. 

Whether running for office, marrying the person of your dreams, or pathetically castigating a section of the community because you don't really understand patriotism, one should stick with the one song whose meaning is straightforward, unambiguous and universal. And that song is Ray Parker Jr's Ghostbusters.

After all, in this complicated and ever-changing world, we can surely agree that bustin' makes us all feel good, right?

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