“Live in the Moment”, the third single from Portland-via-Alaska indie rock band Portugal. The Man’s eighth full-length album Woodstock (2017) has a very tough act to follow. Their previous retro-leaning single “Feel It Still” has proved to be the crossover hit that it was engineered to be, achieving the No. 1 position on six of the major airplay charts (while peaking at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100): Radio Songs, Pop Songs, Adult Pop Songs, Alternative Songs, Adult Alternative Songs and Dance/Mix Show Airplay. With this extramusical context, the song could very well be interpreted as a laid-back celebration of one’s past success: ‘Ooo, la-la-la-la-la/ Let's live in the moment’. Why think of the future when the present could very well be the highlight of your career?
Given the absence of the band’s psych-rock trappings on the song (in favor of a relatively generic and straightforward pop-rock production), the lyrics ‘Come back Sunday morning/ With that soul to sell’ can also be interpreted as a cynical meta-commentary on the ‘sell-out’ accusations the band has faced. The band has been criticized for merely paying lip service to the “societal and political unease” they claim to address while shrewdly positioning themselves for maximum mainstream exposure, and this song is ill-equipped to offer a rebuttal.
“Live in the Moment” has certainly not been crafted to encourage attention towards its sole charged political reference (‘When your family swinging from the branches of a tree’: a reference to the “racial terror lynchings” that mar American history). Vague and anthemic, it continues their diversion into radio-friendliness by allowing listeners to imagine what they’re fleeing from, and which implicitly ‘woke’ direction they are headed towards. The accompanying video, which sees the band driving a car with a giant puppet on its roof as they flee from another car with an authority figure puppet - visually reinforces the song’s ideological open-endedness.
