"Time to Pretend"

MGMT - Time to Pretend (2008)

When I grow up, I wanna be a Rock Star!



Debut single of one of the up-and-coming bands of the new millennium. The album Oracular Spectacular that this appears on has been consistently selling since 2008 and this and other tracks remain on modern rock play-lists, commercials and movie trailers. Their second album was a success, and their third is due out later this year, but this track remains in the public consciousness. This song was originally written years before they recorded it for this album and is clearly a wishful-hopeful/mocking-pipe dream version of the rock star life that the two college buddies who formed MGMT talked about before they ever started opening for M.I.A., Radiohead, or Paul McCartney.

I'm not one for synthesizers, but I like the crunchy feedback sounding heavy chords that hold the song up. I also like the drums that alternate between a high hat heavy, metronome-tight beat and the tom and crash cymbal driven section that sounds free and open. There is a lot of other synth sounds going on, and picking each one out would take forever, but there are string parts, horn parts, and they all manage to work, but the only one I really like is around 1:23 and sounds like a vibraphone. It's a catchy songs, and the synthesizers lead themselves to the dream like state of forecasting a rock and roll future, I guess I just miss bass and guitars. Fun lyrics though, gotta give them that.