Total Entertainment Forever

Album: Pure Comedy (2017)
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Songfacts®:

  • Father John Misty performed this song during his debut appearance on Saturday Night Live on March 4, 2017.
  • The song opens with lyrics about having virtual reality sex with Taylor Swift.

    Bedding Taylor Swift every night inside the Oculus Rift
    After mister and missus finish dinner and the dishes
    .

    Speaking with Exclaim!, Misty explained the lyric is not an expression of his desire to bed the songstress. Instead, he's reflecting society's "disturbing," obsessive taste for entertainment of all forms.

    "Human civilizations," he said, "have been entertaining themselves in disgusting ways all through human history — I mean, whether it's lighting Christians on fire, or whatever. We have to consider that maybe there are ways in which we entertain ourselves now that are equally as disturbing. I think that that's important — to not assume that everything about the way we live is the direct product of progress."

    "The fact of the matter is, I don't want that to happen to Taylor Swift," Misty continued. "That is the worst thing I can think of; that is so horrible. But again, this plays into progress, where like, the internet was supposed to be this new democracy, a utopia of information where everyone had a voice and we were all interconnected, and we would experience true democracy — and it turned into pornography, followed only by outrage. The tools represent some kind of technological advancement, but if we can't act like more than angry ecstasy freaks with the most advanced technology in the world, then how much have we really progressed?"

    "And if you don't think that this virtual reality thing isn't going to turn into sex with celebrities, then you're kidding yourself," he concluded. "That face recognition stuff? I mean, there are people working on it right now. It's absurd. Someone sitting with this headset on, you know?"
  • The bonkers video features former Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin as a Kurt Cobain-looking character stuck in a video game played by a Viagra-popping George Washington. Culkin gets kidnapped by a group of men led by Father John Misty, who is dressed up as Ronald McDonald with papier-mâché hooks for hands. Bill Clinton shows up to play saxophone before being crucified alongside the former child star and Garfield owner Jon Arbuckle.

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