Time Out For Fun

An interview with Mark Mothersbaugh [thanks, Cardhouse].

Mothersbaugh has since written songs for more than a hundred television shows and movies, including Pee Wee's Playhouse, The Rugrats Movie, and The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: The Visitors from Outer Space, as well as a number of jingles -- though he never misses an opportunity to adulterate. He's suggested that it's "?entirely possible" he's embedded the words "Sugar is bad for you" into a cereal commercial; and he has admitted to sneaking the phrase "Question Authority" into a kids' show tune.

In high school, I remember taping a bunch of songs on an old reel-to-reel audio recorder with a some friends and swapping reels and doing the whole play it backwards thing. We tried a few songs, but I specifically remember trying "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen and "Time out for fun" by Devo. I remember there being a rumor floating around that there was supposed to be some kind of message on the Queen song but we couldn't hear it. (although this does a pretty good job of pointing it out.) However, with the Devo song it was pretty clear that it was back-masked. When played backwards, at the point where they sing the chorus:

"Time out for fun!"

you hear:

"They'll call time out!"

Yes, they will. I've learned that. But it was still cool and fun back when we were young and carefree. Well, as carefree as you're gonna get when you're in school. It's all relative afterall.

I also love this quote:

MM: Here's what it was. Somewhere around 1974, a friend of ours, Chuck Statler, came over to where we were rehearsing. He said, "Check this out." It was a Popular Science article all about laserdiscs. "Everyone will have them next year!" it said. And they were described as whole albums which not only had sounds, but visuals. You could almost get a whole movie on them, the original ones, and they looked just like a vinyl record. And we thought, "Damn! That's the end of rock and roll, because the great artists are going to be the ones who are into both sound and vision."

We became totally convinced then that we wanted to make art for that world -- the one beyond rock and roll, which we were sure was going to be populated by people who had something to say both visually and musically. Which felt good to us, since we were visual artists in college. So we were writing music that was saying good-bye to rock and roll. That's what we thought we were doing: deconstructing music that was popular at the time -- disco and concert rock, like Styx and Foreigner. The message for that music was "I'm white, I'm stupid, I'm a conspicuous consumer and I'm proud of it." Disco, on the other hand, was music that was like a beautiful woman with no brain.

Good stuff.