Foucault and MGMT's "Oracular Spectacular"

Michael Foucault conflates and analyzes the ideas of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, (the three men that are the zeitgeist of nineteenth century thought) concerning various techniques of interpretation. Primarily Foucault focuses on the role of language in interpretation, he comes to the conclusion that language is suspicious in two distinct ways. The lack in the symbolic of language represents a surplus; there is more to language that what is being shown. Secondly, there are other forms of language than verbal language. Foucault then focuses on the result of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud’s interpretation which he believes to be counterproductive in a way that instead of assigning new meaning to “things which did not have any meaning;” in other words interpreting things to mean something else,  they “modified the way in which the sign in general could be interpreted” (Foucault 61). The three philosophers strategy of interpretation all become frivolous in sense because Foucault points out the inexhaustibility of interpretation, which the philosophers acknowledge as well (Foucault 63). The nothingness which interpretation leads to is attributed to two of  Foucault’s theories. The first says, “if interpretation can never be brought to an end, it is simply because there is nothing to interpret” and the second “interpretation finds itself before the obligation of interpreting itself endlessly, of always correcting itself”; essentially, there may be nothing to interpret, as the signifiers have already done it for us (Foucault 65-66).

MGMT’s album “Oracular Spectacular” is often referred to as the second coming of Woodstock in album form  because of the seventies psychedelic influence that drives the album and stage performance. Seventies psychedelic music was inevitably the latent content that contributed to the creation of the album, however, MGMT seems to be interpreting  the Woodstock era’s sounds and societal ideas  to create a new age version. In Foucault’s view of Nietzsche's theories, MGMT’s interpretation is trivial because by virtue of Woodstock existing and there being multiple signifiers to acknowledge its existence, Woodstock has already been interpreted. Furthermore, MGMT’s interpretation  has taken on the “function of concealing” what the influence of Woodstock actually is because the signs are in nature, concealing. Therefore the interpretation of the already deceiving signs become even more beguiling. The product of all the deceiving results in replication. MGMT’s interpretation of Woodstock created yet another “definition of all of the possible types of resemblance” of a signifier(Foucault 60).