"Time to Pretend"

I hadn't gotten to MGMT's Oracular Spectacular when I wrote about the music I was listening to 2 months ago, but I recently read this description of my favorite track by them and wanted to copy it down.

What makes "Time to Pretend" so universally liked (even by cranky indie rock purists) is its dazzling wire walk between smug, smartass irony and actual lust for the kind of fucked-up celebrity lifestyle that keeps Perez Hilton in bandwidth. MGMT's perfect sound was an evolution. The duo's earlier self-produced Casio-chintzy version of the song made no secret of then-college students Ben Goldwasser and Andrew Van Wyngarden's dry disdain. But Dave Fridmann's major-label-funded take two is something out of Hieronymus Bosch, a lush pleasure garden of melodies twining like naked limbs, guitars and drums distorted into dirty, Ecstatic grooves. It's all a little unsettling-- decadence always is. But MGMT pull "Pretend" off with the kind of conviction that standing on the precipice of stardom can give you. --Amy Granzin

Pitchfork Media's notes on the track, which they rated as #99 on their list of the top 500 songs of 2000-2009.

I told a friend a while ago that "Time to Pretend" is my favorite song by MGMT, even though most people prefer "Kids" or "Electric Feel." I said that I think most people interpret it as the singers' serious desire to screw around with their lives and have a good time while they're young, but I prefer to see it as a disdainful mockery of people who do that - or a weird mix of the two. I love how absurd it is, and how it bounds between being youthfully indulgent and angsty, artfully annoyed and celebratory. A lot of that is in the contrast between the music and the lyrics. Ms. Granzin pretty much read my mind, I'm convinced. I recommend it highly.

Also, I really dig Hieronymus Bosch.

I don't know if gin was around in 15th century Netherlands, but if it was, I bet Bosch enjoyed it.