NOTE: I wrote this article for a writing course at uni. Hence it is a bit of a wank. Make that a large wank. I disgust myself with the amount of crap I wrote in this article. But my teacher is old and you gotta spell these things out. I make myself sick.
In a world where you can replace a fan with an air-conditioned shirt, serve up reindeer pâté at Christmas lunch and escape looking unhealthy by buying a plate with salad painted onto the surface it’s easy to overlook the simple pleasures in life. Let’s face it, just because you eat spaghetti with a battery powered fork that twirls your linguini into a mouthful-sized ball does not make you happier than the next person. And as for the kids of today, we wouldn’t know how to cook a meal unless it was some kind of cooking challenge where you use controllers instead of wooden spoons on the Nintendo Wii. So when a young and good-looking new band starts singing about missing the playgrounds, animals and digging up worms we pause and take a collective deep breath. Unzip your wearable sleeping bag and step into the crisp, yet somehow familiar fresh air. It’s time to reconnect with the once forgotten real world. MGMT is here to teach us how to live again.
Oracular Spectacular is the brave attempt of a young Brooklyn based band only a few years out of high school to remind people there is a world outside this all-consuming monolith we call society. Time To Pretend is an anthem for the young and restless people on the overwhelming cusp of adulthood. Warning against falling into the trap of getting jobs in offices and waking for the “morning commute”, Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser call us to join in their luring chant. Singing, “I’ll move to Paris, shoot some heroin and fuck with the stars” with clear self-awareness we see MGMT may be the hedonistic leaders of this generation. Interested in pursuing happiness in its simplest form, VanWyngarden prioritises an amusement with the world as his main viewpoint. However self-indulgent the lyrics, there is a poignant sense of yearning beneath the searing synthesisers and distant trumpets. “I’ll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world” punctures the fragile hearts of dissipated youth and reminds us how simple delight can often be. Citing choking on our vomit as “the end” MGMT build Time To Pretend to a sincere crescendo, which explodes into the anthem of disenchanted youth and nothingness.
Electric Feel combines angelic keyboard melodies, jangly guitars and rhythmic tribal drums to produce an almost hypnotising account of the thrill and potency of unsophisticated love. The film clip to this song is a celebration of existentialism and reverberates Sartre’s view that existence precedes essence. We are told to “do what you feel now/electric feel now”. MGMT are revelling in a magnificent pit of steam, gorillas playing instruments and semi-naked bodies in the middle of a majestic jungle. There is no outside world to the conch shell blowing members of MGMT in this moment. And we too are hypnotised into this lull of real world attachments for the magic four minutes of this new wave hymn. The moon is then cracked open to ooze with a glowing neon substance and the ridiculously beautiful jungle dwellers begin to paint it over each other’s bodies. It may be an ode to the American Indians who discovered carnotite, a soft red and yellow radioactive substance, similar to uranium that they used as body paint. However in 2008 MGMT’s carnotite glows and sparkles with a myriad of pixelated rainbow colours shining over the skin of the glorified youth in this video.
Screams of children in an amusement park paves the way for the uplifting synthesiser line that is the opening of Kids. Wander into any shop or nightclub tuned into alternative culture and you can guarantee you will hear the chorus line which calls to “Control yourself/take only what you need from it” booming around the room. Quite a conflicting message to play in a retail environment where success is based on the consumer’s money, but MGMT must outweigh the basic premise of capitalism. VanWyngarden captures the essence of sunny childhood in the line, “you pick the insects off plants/no time to think of consequences”. MGMT may be fixated on the innocence and purity of their earlier years, but not in an obsessive way. They recognize how society has shaped us into power hungry robots and are yearning to distance themselves from consumerism- at least on the surface anyway. They did just sell their song Weekend Wars to underwear giant, Bonds to use in their new TV commercial!
The strange but alluring visual aesthetics of MGMT echo the hippy movement of the sixties but add another dimension to the colour and freedom of these clothes. Think capes, tribal body paint and neon capped off with woolly beanies and you will get the feeling. The Youth is a timeless, swirling lullaby made of distant vocals and slow and celestial whirls of jittering guitar and tinkling tambourines. MGMT are frolicking in the shadows of bands like The Velvet Underground but with a modern twist. Lyrics like, “We could flood the streets with love or light or heat whatever/Lock the parents out, cut a rug, twist and shout” have the same rogue sensibilities of the sixties but while MGMT are celebrating their freedom, there is also a despondent feel to Oracular Spectacular.
MGMT know that while we live in a world where things like pre-cooked bacon and electronic bubble wrap flourish; essentially nothing matters. Oracular Spectacular summons us to thrive in the simple charm of doing what makes you happy in the moment. In Time To Pretend VanWyngarden sings, “I’m feeling rough/I’m feeling raw/In the prime of my life”, and we as unsettled youth can empathise. I guess we have found the soundtrack to play while we stumble around, finding our feet, seeking out happiness in this crazy world.
