30. MGMT - Time to Pretend

I think it has become way beyond overdone to diss the shallowness of the modern celebrity lifestyle. While shows like The Soup, the Daily Show, and Colbert Report do a great job of skewering the Celebreality obsession that seems to have permeated our nation's once great music video stations I feel like sometimes they might miss the point. I like to think that this celebrity obsession is just one giant inside joke. Everything from E!, to People Magazine, to I Love New York, to The Simple Life is doing us a favor by saying, "can you believe how incredibly fucked up and shallow these people are? Let's watch them to see how horrible they can be in this next scene."

Okay so what the fuck am I talking about? To make this even more confusing I'm gonna direct your (all three of you) attention to this painting by Diego Velazquez called Las Meninas. Noted smoking hot former William and Mary art history professor Jenny Ramirez suggested that maybe what was going on here is that the artist who had been commissioned to paint the Spanish royal family had included himself in the painting to imply that he knew what you knew... that the inbred Spanish royal family was a bunch of dullards. Just look at the look on his face... it's the one you give your friends over a girls shoulder when you're dancing that says, "I have no idea how in the fuck this happened but I'm just gonna roll with it for the time being."

Now it's time to half heartedly tie all this into the #30 on our list. Time to pretend is pointing all this out. Behind rich instrumentals (I hear handclaps... and wait is that a string section... and hey a TRUMPET! It's like someone is testing out each instrument on an old Casio) and a ridiculously catchy and impossible to get out of your head synth melody that drives the chorus, the folks in MGMT deliver the proverbial bitchslap to the Brett Michaels/Motley Crue image of the rockstar lifestyle and like Velazquez and umm.. I Love New York, they do so in a way that only those of us who are in on the joke will understand. And hey, that's hot.