It’s funny how far away and long ago the Noughties seem; for such a pessimistic decade, it sure yielded some of the sunniest and blissfully ambivalent tunes of our generation, and MGMT reined supreme in this aspect. It was their 2007 debut, Oracular Spectacular that unleashed upon the unsuspecting masses the collegiate psychedelia swill that has since overtaken critic’s lists and the general population’s listening, unfortunately clogging ears so much that few, if any, chose to look beyond the obvious pop-aphorisms of “Kids” and “Time to Pretend”. If one was to inspect MGMT with much more of a critical arc, they’d find that Oracular Spectacular, more than anything, is a fractured and generally malformed grouping of psych-doodles, electronic art-queefs, and ultimately an exercise in over-educated indulgence on the part of it’s two core members, Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser. But thrust into an arena where a definite commercial void had been growing, MGMT struck a cord with the nouveau-riche university set, the hipster-alums, the up-n-coming scenesters, and the generally distracted public. Their bleeting, boho-sheik brand of bottom bottle psychedelia scrapes at the last vestiges of independent musical provocation, taking the formless idealism of art-pop and recasting it to fit the perfect Pitchfork Media approved adjectives of “orchestral” or something of the same pool, which is greedily gobbled up thereafter by the adoring masses. It is not as if MGMT are really a prime evil though; they are a collage of influence, smattered across the bones of something that is itching to grow a skin, but Oracular Spectacular never actually achieves anything. The duo impressed upon their listeners a definitive mission statement from the get-go (“Time to Pretend”), but almost renege on their promise of fanciful make-believe by offering nostalgic retrospasms of childhood (“Weekend Wars”) or meaningless sex jingles (“Electric Feel”). Their goal is less the progression of cosmic awareness like the psychedelic forefathers such as Soft Machine, Hawkwind, Jefferson Airplane and others had in mind, rather, MGMT partition influence and commercialization as two very separate entities, taking from the former to effectively bolster the latter. By being exactly what their taproot source was not, they guide listeners in a path of enlightened musical capitalism - never really giving more than the market says they should. And so, MGMT will go down in history as one of the single greatest tricks popular music ever played on us—and they’re laughing all the way to the bank.
Listen to “Time to Pretend” (Live at Abbey Road Studios, 2009) and “4th Dimensional Transition”
Download “Oracular Spectacular“
