REWIND: Fantasy Island

Every Friday, we hit rewind to visit one of our older playlists. The following is one of our favorites from the Loudcrowd vaults. We’re pretty jazzed about Canadian superstar indie electro act Metric’s new album Fantasies — so much so that we constructed an entire playlist around the concept of fantasies. These songs celebrate and/or describe sweet revenge, wild things, lust on the loose and delusional people. They all cavort about in naked displays of wanton… wanting! It’s enough to make you want to rip your shirt off and scream loudly, especially if you are currently seated in a cubicle.

In researching this piece (hey, I used two different search engines) I came across the concept of a “fixed fantasy.” This is apparently when someone is stuck in a belief that they’re sure is real but turns out to be totally bogus. The term isn’t usually used on its own — it’s not itself a syndrome, but regularly accompanies some kind of personality disorder (if not a psychotic break due to a drug overdose). The important thing is that the person is locked into the fantasy. Which doesn’t sound like much fun, does it? Unless you’re stuck believing that you’re walking around on candy canes all day and that naked nymphs cavort about you and cater to your whims. That might actually be fantastic, and worth being a nutter for.

Ohh, and speaking of psychiatric diagnoses and the DSM-IV, did you ever poke around the definitions for various personality disorders? It can be worse than plugging in symptoms to WebMD when you think maybe that headache and mosquito bite actually add up to cancer. For instance, I’m now convinced someone I’m close to (and no it’s not me) has Narcissistic Personality Disorder; he displays eight of the nine traits pretty well. Then again, I’m guilty of a few of ‘em myself. One of the symptoms? He “is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.” Mwah, hah, hah?

When I hear the word “fantasy” I am transported to my youth, to when I was in fourth grade way back in the late 1970s, I would beg to be allowed to stay up late enough on Friday nights to watch this strange yet predictable show starring an elderly leathery looking super suave and skinny dude named Mr. Roarke and his strangely-voiced excitable round-ish little sidekick named Tattoo. They lived on an island where all your dreams could come true. The old adage that you should be careful what you wish for was always in effect, and everyone always learned this great moral lesson at the end of it, and after the hour was up they realized that they always had what they really wanted anyway.

This could be interpreted as a method of crowd control by the Man — like, there’s no sense letting utopian dreams percolate; much better to sell folks on the idea that your fantasies are never really possible (and if they were they’d just suck anyway). Me, I just thought the show was funny and looked cool. I also really wanted to go to that island and become some kind of rich rock star with my own castle and thirty motorcycles. Sometimes I still want that — I guess I should go look that up to diagnose my pathology?

—DJ Yeti