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MGMT – Time to Pretend (Official HD Video)
It’s hard to judge whether “Time To Pretend” was the riskiest opening salvo in the history of bands or if MGMT were pulling all of our legs. By predicting a fame and fortune scenario in the song that they hadn’t yet experienced, they were opening themselves up for ridicule if it flopped. But perhaps they realized that they possessed the goods, as the song is one of the most lauded to be released in this century to date.
MGMT is comprised of Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden, and they wrote “Time To Pretend” as college students before including it as the leadoff track on their 2008 debut album Oracular Spectacular. As VanWyngarden told Rolling Stone, there was always a little bit of misdirection involved in the song. “Some think we’re druggies,” he said. “Others see the tongue-in-cheek element. That’s what I hope for as a lyricist: confusion!”
What wasn’t at all confusing was the catchiness of the music, highlighted by a mischievous synth riff and skyscraping chorus. The lyrics come out swinging with braggadocio: “I’m feeling rough, I’m feeling raw/ I’m in the prime of my life.” But the goals mentioned in the next line might not strike some people as the most noble: “Let’s make some music, make some money/ Find some models for wives.” At that point, you’ve either bailed out on the song as obnoxious boasting or you’re in for the long haul with VanWyngarden’s sly humor.
Heroin, cocaine, islands, and “elegant cars” soon follow, exaggerating the dream to comic proportions. “This is our decision, to live fast and die young,” goes the chorus. The alternative: “Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute.” Personal relationships have to suffer, of course: “Forget about our mothers and our friends.”
Yet it’s too limiting to read this as just a parody of a hedonistic, rock-star lifestyle. In the second verse, the narrator begins to wax nostalgic for the life he’s leaving behind, full of relatives, pets, worm-digging, freedom, and alone time. But sacrifices have to be made: “Love must be forgotten/Life can always start up anew.”
The humor then resurfaces for MGMT’s take on the circle of life: “The models will have children, we’ll get a divorce/ We’ll find some more models, everything must run its course.” And then, the inevitable, unavoidable climax once you’ve started down that path: “We’ll choke on our vomit and that will be the end/ We were fated to pretend.”
MGMT followed up the success of Oracular Spectacular, which contained several other earworm singles, with music that was more complex and less pop-oriented, as if they were worried that too many sure shots like the ones on that album could lead them to fulfilling their prophecy. Their catalog since has been challenging but rewarding for those who want to make the leap. But first there was “Time To Pretend,” the song where they imagined a debauched victory lap for a race they hadn’t yet run.
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In his book HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? Francis Schaeffer noted:
The man who followed on from that point was English–Aldous Huxley (1894-1963). He proposed drugs as a solution. We should, he said, give healthy people drugs and they can then find truth inside their own heads. All that was left for Aldous Huxley and those who followed him was truth inside a person’s own head. With Huxley’s idea, what began with the existential philosophers – man’s individual subjectivity attempting to give order as well as meaning, in contrast to order being shaped by what is objective or external to oneself – came to its logical conclusion. Truth is in one’s own head. The ideal of objective truth was gone.
This emphasis on hallucinogenic drugs brought with it many rock groups–for example, Cream, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Incredible String Band, Pink Floyd, and Jimi Hendrix. Most of their work was from 1965-1958. The Beatles’Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) also fits here. This disc is a total unity, not just an isolated series of individual songs, and for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. As a whole, this music was the vehicle to carry the drug culture and the mentality which went with it across frontiers which were almost impassible by other means of communication.
Here is a good review of the episode 016 HSWTL The Age of Non-Reason of HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE?, December 23, 2007:
Together with the advent of the “drug Age” was the increased interest in the West in the religious experience of Hinduism and Buddhism. Schaeffer tells us that: “This grasping for a nonrational meaning to life and values is the central reason that these Eastern religions are so popular in the West today.” Drugs and Eastern religions came like a flood into the Western world. They became the way that people chose to find meaning and values in life. By themselves or together, drugs and Eastern religion became the way that people searched inside themselves for ultimate truth.
Along with drugs and Eastern religions there has been a remarkable increase “of the occult appearing as an upper-story hope.” As modern man searches for answers it “many moderns would rather have demons than be left with the idea that everything in the universe is only one big machine.” For many people having the “occult in the upper story of nonreason in the hope of having meaning” is better than leaving the upper story of nonreason empty. For them horror or the macabre are more acceptable than the idea that they are just a machine.
Francis Schaeffer has correctly argued:
The universe was created by an infinite personal God and He brought it into existence by spoken word and made man in His own image. When man tries to reduce [philosophically in a materialistic point of view] himself to less than this [less than being made in the image of God] he will always fail and he will always be willing to make these impossible leaps into the area of nonreason even though they don’t give an answer simply because that isn’t what he is. He himself testifies that this infinite personal God, the God of the Old and New Testament is there.
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Johnny Cash had a long struggle with drugs and his story was told in an earlier post.
MGMT – Time to Pretend (Official HD Video)
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The Daily Hatch 