1
Time to pretend - MGMT
"I'll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms
I'll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world
I'll miss my sister, miss my father, miss my dog and my home
Yeah, I'll miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone"
Browsing through all the inevitable year-end best-of lists and seeing MGMT hanging out at the top of so many of them makes me feel like a bit of a toolbag for putting “Time to Pretend” at the top of my singles list. But this song is everything that a good pop song should be: It is musically innovative while at the same time being easy to listen to and even something you can sing along with. So what if it’s a trend, I can’t help it. I like MGMT. Everyone else seems to, so it can’t be all that wrong.
It's a challenge to communicate one simple emotion in a pop song, let alone two complicated ones. The achievement of "Time to Pretend" is that it's simultaneously detached and wrenching. Brooklyn duo Benjamin Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden mock their own rock star ambitions ("I'll move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and fuck with the stars/ You man the island and the cocaine and the elegant cars") while a space-pop melody with a Ziggy Stardust-worthy keyboard riff builds and swirls around them, gradually overwhelming all the irony until what started as a joke of a song ends in genuine sadness.
'This is our decision, to live fast and die young/We've got the vision, now let's have some fun,' sang VanWyngarden with dreamy insouciance on this satire on – or anthem to? – rock's most shameful excesses. When he wrote the track with Goldwasser in 2004, both were two wide-eyed Wesleyan college kids in Connecticut. As it turns out, Time to Pretend (originally titled The Mantis Sailing Home) proved less the in-joke and more a prophetic heralding of their future. Genre-blending psych-pop, the track became a freakbeat theme for the Skins generation. Then Radiohead and Oasis and rock fans (including myself) everywhere discovered the tune, too.
"I was at a yard sale and there was this old wooden model pirate ship. On the boat was this giant preying mantis so I bought it. It was a great pet to have. It's actually the state insect of Connecticut. We would have dance parties and she loved to dance. Her favourite song was Overpowered by Funk by The Clash.
It was a party house that we were living in, with five good friends. Ben made a loop of music that was inspired by the movements of this preying mantis. He played it to me and I thought it was cool and initially it was called The Mantis Sailing Home. It was like a joke song. We performed it like that a couple of times and then we had access to a school studio and we decided to record a couple of tracks. That song, Time to Pretend and another song called Boogie Down. I wrote new lyrics talking about a joke fantasy of us becoming rock stars and getting really famous and becoming huge touring musicians. It was funny that we were just these two kids in Connecticut. We hadn't played a show outside our tiny little campus. We played it a few times at the end of the year. Then we put it on an EP. An intern at Columbia passed the EP onto an A&R woman and she liked it. That's the reason we got signed I guess.
It feels like a cheesy movie when, every night, we're going on stage singing this song. It's like a rock star movie because we're singing a song about touring and becoming rock stars and every night the shows get a little bigger. "
"One of my pals, Ray Tintori made the video to make the video. He's a really brilliant filmmaker so when it came time to make the video we thought it would be really good to stick with people that really understood us. He saw some of our first shows and has known MGMT's music for a long time. He understands the spirit of the band really well. Making that video was a really amazing process. It was the summer of 2007 in New York. There was 25 or 30 people. Everyone was acting crazy. We took one day, and went up to Rockaway beach in Brooklyn without a plan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVnRzEjpUmE
The opening shot of a pagan-looking ritual was thrown together at the last minute. Just when the sun was setting, we made up some symmetrical looking weird things. We had a big bonfire and teepees. Nobody got any permits or anything but the authorities didn't stop us."
Andrew VanWyngarden
Thanks to you again my good friend who introduce me to this band and the ORACULAR SPECTACULAR cd. I forgot your name but I remember that you used to work as a Server Assistant in Tabla during the summertime and you were the good Nate's cousin.
I also remember that the reason that you leave the restaurant was because you got an awesome job opportunity in "Corporate America land". Hope you haven't change kid, Don't let them!!
This is our decision, to live fast and die young.
We've got the vision, now let's have some fun.
Yeah, it's overwhelming, but what else can we do.
Get jobs in offices, and wake up for the morning commute.
Forget about our mothers and our friends,
We're fated to pretend
To pretend
We're fated to pretend
To pretend
No comments:
Post a Comment