I think this Simpsons quote was so especially lodged in my subconscious because of my real experiences with this “explosive gem.” My other brother Jon’s geode, of all the relics housed in my brothers’ rooms, always mesmerized me partly because it resembled the geode in the above Simpsons scene. One of my favorite places growing up was Sterling Hill Mine in the next town over where I collected miniature geodes in bright magenta and aqua.

“Explosive gem” erupted from my childhood memories, fueled by my now too-often suppressed imagination. Appropriately, I believe the same force of nostalgia for the fantasies of childhood drives the lyrics of “Time to Pretend. MGMT similarly reminisce about childhood while fantasizing about their future as rock-stars. As the song juxtaposes youthful fantasies of fame, fortune, and creative expression with contemplative sentimentality about growing up, I think about how who we want to be as adults is intertwined with our childhood dreams and desires; yet, at the same time, the inevitability of growing up and pursuing our adult identities forever severs us from the carelessness of childhood. After describing the band’s life plan, Andrew VanWyngardens sings, “I’ll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms.”  To pursue dreams of music fortune and fun, he’ll never go back to the innocent play of childhood.

Jesse  told me, “The phrase “explosive gem’ gets very few Google hits [and] has exactly zero appearances in Google’s N-gram corpus” (Thanks, NERD!) The only media he had found relating to explosive gem was this adorable YouTube video of a little boy, playing with his plastic figurines, entitled “Rock Monster Eating an Explosive Gem.” This is exactly the kind of innocent pretending I, and I believe MGMT, miss and often yearn to revive.

Sure, I love the synth, bassline, and clapping samples – qualities of the “neon poison” classification of music that my Tufts WMFO freeform radio show co-host and friend so “complimentarily” defined as my personal musical taste. And maybe, according to the songwriters themselves, this song is mostly inspired by a pet praying mantis, so I’m bit hesitant to say my interpretation is the song’s intended meaning. But four years after this song came out, after graduating college, entering Boston’s daily 9-5 grind, and scrambling to find a sense of purpose in my post-graduate, post-academic-structure existence, discussions with my brother Jesse drew me back to these words.

I think “Time to Pretend”’s fiery twenty-something spirit makes it such a fun anthem for myself and other fans of the song. But at the same time, I’m more intrigued by how this bravado tends to emphasize their naiveté and mask their anxiety. The gap between the band’s fantasy of fame and fortune and their reality, turns this rock-star manifesto into an admittance that, for now, the boys are only pretending. The story of the kind of life they hope to attain someday is little more than a list of stereotypes about the rock and roll lifestyle.  Maybe they’re in the “prime of their [lives]” and resolute in the decision to “live fast and die young,” but they’ve barely embarked on the infamous journey to sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The naiveté of their fantasy lasts until the first chorus. Here they admit the gravity of this decision – how “overwhelming” it is. This evokes a sense of existential weight that every twenty-something shares. In becoming independent persons, we must imagine who we want to be, what life we want to live, with very little empirical knowledge of what to expect in actuality. And in order bring our dreams into reality, we have to pursue this independence, “forget about our mothers and our friends” and pretend to know what we’re doing.