What 2003 Sounded Like
A few words about MGMT
There was a video doing the rounds this week. A clip from a video, more accurately. It’s a couple goofy looking guys performing a song for a small gathering of students at Wesleyan in 2003. The duo are MGMT, then calling themselves The Management, and the song is “Kids”.
If you were a sentient being in around 2008 or 2009, you heard “Kids,” along with their other two hit singles “Time to Pretend” and “Electric Feel”. They were perfect pop songs for the moment, with a synth-infused indie appeal, catchy hooks, and a sound that placed them in conversation with the likes of Arcade Fire, Animal Collective and others. I don’t even know that I much cared for MGMT at the time, and their forays into more experimental sounds, frankly, didn’t interest me. What I do know is I heard those three singles constantly, and they were catchy, and they were good.
And then I saw the video of Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser performing “Kids” in 2003 and the nostalgia hit hard and I had to admit, that’s one of the best pop songs of the century so far. Except 2003 makes no sense. The nostalgia I had was for 2009. I don’t remember anything in 2003 sounding like “Kids”, and though I wasn’t the most up on music scenes when I was in those early years of high school, I feel like the song would have sounded totally new to me had I heard it then.
I tweeted about that, writing, “it actually does scramble my brain a bit to think this song was out in the world, being performed as early as 2003. sounds like nothing else from that time.” The tweet went viral for some reason (my most successful tweet!), which of course meant a lot of people in my replies telling me I was a moron. Hadn’t I heard of [insert band] or [insert album]? Names flew at me fast, and I was genuinely interested to check them all out, even the ones I knew well already. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps my sense of time so clouded. Maybe MGMT did just sound like Daft Punk or Ladytron or LCD Soundsystem or The Faint or whoever else was mixing synthy dance beats with indie pop at the time. Listening through all those examples (and many, many, many more), I was not dissuaded. There were bits and pieces. One could somewhat understand how MGMT arrived at their sound based on what had been in the air for some years prior. Yet “Kids” still sounds different, and new. Even now.
The dirty not-so-secret behind MGMT’s big singles is that they were written as something of a joke, a goof. VanWyngarden and Goldwasser weren’t interested in making pop music. They were into more experimental work, and songs like “Time to Pretend” were made, in large part, to prove they could do the pop thing. Because pop was easy, or simple at least. Derivative, certainly. That’s kind of pop’s whole deal. In their effort, though, they created some kind of odd amalgam of those pop sounds they recognized with the more boundary-pushing music they had more affinity for, and out of that strange combination came a sound that actually was unlike anything else.
One counter-example that kept coming up was Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head”, produced by Cathy Dennis and Rob Davis. I suppose I’d never took the time to consider that song beyond its being a killer earworm. Listening back, I understood why people brought it up. The synths do sound similar in spots, and the marriage of a Daft Punk-like sound with pure disco pop does describe “Kids” fairly well. The songs don’t actually sound like each other, but that’s the beauty of music.
The odd thing, though, is that when I watch that video of MGMT in 2003, I do actually recognize it. The sound doesn’t fit my memory of the time, but everything else does. The clothes being worn by those college students, the semi-ironic performance of the song, the shitty consumer digital video. That is what 2003 felt like, even for a kid in the Toronto suburbs in Grade 9. Funny the way that works. The shocking thing about hearing that song coming from that time is that it collapses any notion of time as some static object. Our memories are constantly reshaped by new perspective and new context, and the notion that we can pick a point in time and think we understand it in its totality is flawed to say the least. “Kids” was not a 2003 song, but apparently it also was. It’s what 2003 sounded like, we just didn’t know it at the time.