The MGMT song about a lifestyle that they “didn’t really want”
The massive explosion in popularity that MGMT experienced in the late 2000s seemingly came out of nowhere. Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser formed the band as a lark while studying at Wesleyan University, playing occasional house shows and one-off bashes whenever they had time away from their studies. The duo didn’t originally take MGMT very seriously, but after graduating in 2005, the pair’s Time to Pretend EP had gotten popular enough for them to begin touring extensively.
That EP had the first version of what would become one of the band’s signature songs: ‘Time to Pretend’. A sardonic send-up of rock star aspirations, ‘Time to Pretend’ was strong enough to be re-recorded for their 2007 debut LP, Oracular Spectacular. The origins of the song didn’t actually have anything to do with fame or success – it was simply a beat that the duo’s pet praying mantis would bob to.
“We wrote ‘Time to Pretend’ our senior year of college, and the music was inspired by a praying mantis we had in our house,” VanWyndgarden explained during the band’s Live From Abbey Road sessions. “She laid eggs and it died, and we laid the egg case on this kinda model pirate ship on the mantlepiece, and the eggs hatched and all these baby praying mantises were climbing up the rigging of the ship, and it was pretty crazy… so the music was inspired by our praying mantis that liked to dance to The Clash and the lyrics are just about us imagining being rock stars….and yeah, fantasy rock star life.”
“[‘Time to Pretend’] refers to this fantasy, this joke of us being sell-out rock stars. It’s not like we ever set out to have that lifestyle – we didn’t really want that, but it’s definitely different now we’re playing big festival shows and touring all the time,” Goldwasser told The Independent in 2008. “Some of it is true. It’s pretty weird. I don’t think the fame is really the ultimate part of the fantasy. We wanted to get to the point where we could do really ridiculous things. We want to have some really crazy stage production.”
The song was the subject of censorship, specifically the line “I’ll move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and fuck with the stars.” VanWyngarden didn’t have an issue with the controversy around the line, wearing it as a badge of honour. “I think that’s cool. I think it’s great that some people can listen to the song and get offended,” he told Digital Spy. “Some will think it’s serious and think we’re actually druggies, while others will see the tongue-in-cheek element to it. That’s all I can hope for as a lyricist – confusion!”
Despite being a tongue-in-cheek look at success in the music industry, ‘Time to Pretend’ really did make MGMT stars. As a top 40 hit in the UK, ‘Time to Pretend’ was the first step in MGMT leading a new generation of indie rockers after the original indie scene of the early 2000s had largely burned out. MGMT themselves weren’t terribly keen on taking on that responsibility, crafting highly psychedelic and purposefully anti-commercial records for a number of years that undermined the success they found from their debut LP.
Check out ‘Time to Pretend’ down below.
