Weekend Wars

It feels like the song is about being unhappy with our present situation and not having the time or energy to change it. We work all week and can't do anything but sputter for 2 days in between. Most people end up drunk/high instead of fighting/warring for what they believe in. The singer flashes forward into a future and is coming to terms with living hand to mouth, which is easier than making things better. My generation carries this burden and most of us end up taking the easy way out, idealizing the break down of civilization instead of being creative and caring. All we have are predictions--which says something about our lack of volition and our disenfranchisement--and when all we do is talk about change we are cursed. We should fight the weekend wars and make the rest of the week bearable, but we have to work tomorrow.

To me, this song and a lot of MGMT songs sound like the trials of being a teenager with no REAL problems, like a teenager from the suburbs who would be grouped with the outcasts. I always felt like "weekend wars" refers to the NEED to fight boredom, especially during that time in life when you're at the end of your teenage years and you're almost independent, but you aren't quite to the point where you take life seriously or have serious responsibilities.

"Where we could crush some plants to paint my walls And I won't try to fight in the weekend wars" This is about drug use. Crushing up plants is a reference to breaking apart marijuana. It is saying that fighting for an awesome weekend is no longer necessary, so why not smoke a bowl and chill out. This reminds me of when drugs stopped being exciting and started to become necesary.

"Was I? I was to lazy to bathe Or paint or write or try to make a change Now I can shoot a gun to kill my lunch And I don't have to love or think too much" This verse is talking about the point when doing drugs or living a certain way just becomes so routine. When you become a prisoner to your own life. You stop caring or thinking about what is actually going on, you just act mindlessly and go about life without a thought.

"I'm a curse and I'm a sound When I open up my mouth There's a reason I don't win I don't know how to begin" This person has realized that "fighting the weekend wars" is a miserable way of life. But they don't know how to get out of it.

This is a fantastic song, it always reminds me of high school.

In an interview, they said it's about a relationship. Weekend wars is the time on the weekend where both people are at home and they fight, so it's about making the relationship work.

"It's difficult to win unless you're bored."

At face value, this song paints a good picture of a post apocalyptic world. Not bathing, killing animals for food, painting the walls with plants, makeshift bombs, couldn't use computers, etc. all help to emphasize this point. Weekend Wars could be likened to other people, or possibly tribes, raiding and looting and the singer is trying to defend himself from them. "100 years to grow an arm" might refer to radiation from the bombs.

The weirdest part of the song is the "Mystics in twisted metal cars". They could be "prophets" of doom going on about how they were right, or people who have a futile desire for peace.

All of this said I think the song compares very well to fighting in a relationship. It all depends how deep you read into it.

The song is about the frustration of trying to make an impossible change, one that rests on immutable shores. To this end, one would sacrifice almost anything, his "humanity" that looks questionable already, going back to roots, trying to grasp a savage intelligibility on things. When all the mental mystics have failed to account for the contradictory images flashing on one's eyes and in the back of one's mind, the person reverts to an archaic form of oneself, a primitive that only relies on brute force to procure all the bare necessities - lunch and sex, without any care for thought or emotion.

This is the tragedy of the modern man, the one encaged in the cities of a civilisation built on lies and the fear of death. Does he have any real emotions anymore, or maybe just socially negotiated outlets and set expectations for his domesticated feelings? Children and young people enter this monstruous urban machinery of identities, that expects them to learn, behave, be polite, eat regularly, grow up, study, get jobs, pay taxes and become a cog in this political machine.

For a long time in Western civilisation, holidays have been like a return to paradise, to a lost nature that man wants to reconnect with by working all around the year just to get a chance at getting there for a few weeks, on those calm shores. Just the same, weekends were supposed to ease the pressure built up during the week in the urban machinery of work and duty and allow someone to get away from it all. Paradoxically, some actually had to go through even greater hardship during the weekends just to be able to be someone during the next week. These are the weekend warriors, people who have to fight during the weekend just to be able to find who they really are. These are a new kind of warriors, modern ones, artificial warriors, just as people going to the gym look like art-ificial heroes, pumped up with special nutrition and chemicals. All this giant effort for the art-ificial effect of looking like someone who is someone in the city.

Somewhere along this path human instincts have been distorted. Some manage to adapt to the machinery I described, others are rejected and live on the fringes of society, harbouring feelings of anger and planning their own personal armageddon on this world. This type of urban man, as I explained, reverts to a primeval state of emotional reactions, is easy to anger and prime for aggressive retaliation. This is what "instant battle plans written on the sidewalk" means: the person is quick to draw an emotional weapon on anyone who slights him while walking through the urban grid. He has uncouth reactions, scaring the kids off the lawn, and planning for an imaginary revenge on others ("Giving us time to make the makeshift bombs"). One of the causes of the Columbine school shooting was that the parents of the kids who committed the shooting had banned them from using their computers, because they were spending too much time playing video games. This is what deprived the two teenagers of their virtual world where they used to vent. They "couldn't use computers anymore" too, as the guys in the this song, so they started planning for a massive bombing of their school. It might be something related to their going back to roots, though.

The trip to Arizona seems to be an esoteric reference. It might have something to do with a Wild at Heart organisation there... Going back to roots requires one to learn how to deal with animal life in the wild properly. Maybe going back in the wild will rekindle one's lost instinct, "grow the arm back", make the change while synching to the natural vibes of the sand and cold.

"My predictions are the only things I have" Usually people who can make predictions are those who lost their life somehow. Tiresias who was able to penetrate the sacred secret of sex and time was blinded by gods and then given the gift of profecy. He could see the future, but he could neither prevent it nor live his life.

The last stanza is just negative affect related to this realisation. Someone stuck in his inner world of images and mental mystics who doesn't find the power/instict to just be in a natural and normal way. He has to constantly process and relate to what is expected from him by the civilisation he lives in.

I think it is about relationships. Specifically about letting people in and investing into relationships.

"Was I? I was to lazy to bathe Or paint or write or try to make a change Now I can shoot a gun to kill my lunch And I don't have to love or think too much"

I think it's saying that it is much more comfortable to not dive into relationships. And the concept of weekend wars is taking on a "love is a battlefield" theme.

No matter how you interpret this, it is a GREAT song. One of MGMT's best.

I own the actual CD and within the case thing are 'handwritten' lyrics tucked in. The very first line: "Evil S", which no one seems to know what it means... is actually written:

"Evil $" ...as in the dollar sign.. Now it seems mostly explanatory and I'm surprised no one caught that.

Either way, great song! Especially the last verse

no comments yet? this song is frickin sweet

This sounds a little bit like Ziggy Stardust by david Bowie to me.

I read somewhere it was about the end of the world