MGMT
Brooklyn duo gives us a “bullshit” suggestion for this headline
By Dana Stewart
Published: March 7th, 2008 | 12:10pm
MGMT’s Andrew Vanwyngarden and Ben Goldwasser remind me of a scene from the classic rocknroll Simpsons episode, "Homerpalooza" (in which Homer becomes a star on the "Hullabalooza" tour, not for playing music alongside guest voices Sonic Youth or Smashing Pumpkins, but for getting a cannonball shot at his gut every night and not dying). When Homer goes onstage during one of the shows, two grungy, pierced teenagers have the following exchange:
Teen 1: Oh, here comes that cannonball guy. He's cool.
Teen 2: Are you being sarcastic, dude?
Teen 1: I don't even know anymore.
To read about MGMT in one of the many publications that have covered them, you’d think that they’re like any other burgeoning, hip, semi-serious rock group with a sum total age of under 60, which, to an extent, they are. But thinking about them in this way ignores the implausibility of their success, and the duplicitous nature of their project that begs the very question why people make popular music at all anymore. They are coolly aware of the tenacity of their current success but somehow happily exist in the bubble of an dream world, which, for a reason they do not care to fathom, the outside world has chosen to examine.
Vanwyngarden and Goldwasser, both 24, met as fellow music majors at Wesleyan University, an elite liberal arts school with a total enrollment of about 3,000 in Middletown, Connecticut. Both alumni of the class of 2006, the MGMT of today is largely an elaboration of the ideas and beats they cooked up in their dorm rooms. The two spent months making and recording their guitar and beat-driven kind of pop music in their bedrooms before playing their songs at campus shows that clocked in at no more than 20 minutes. "We've always been more interested in recording than touring,” Goldwasser says. “In our live shows, we used to just dick around onstage. We'd spend a lot of time recording stuff in our dorm rooms, and then when we'd play live, we'd sing along with the iPod and do goofy shit. We weren’t trying to be profound or anything."
When one encounters the guys of MGMT, as I did before a February show at Chicago’s Schuba’s Tavern, their authenticity as “regular dudes” is readily apparent. They look as though Columbia Records stormed directly into their college dorm room, told the boys to grab whatever clothes were on the floor, and packed them up for an international tour and a four-record deal. Which is essentially what happened.
HERE’S HOW IT HAPPENED:
In 2006, friends of Goldwasser and Vanwyngarden at NYU formed the record label Cantora Records to produce MGMT’s short catalog of songs onto an EP. Eventually, through a friend of a friend (who was an A&R intern), a producer from Columbia Records showed up in New York and offered MGMT a four-record deal. The company also set them up with hugely influential producer Dave Fridmann (Sleater-Kinney, Flaming Lips, Modest Mouse, Mogwai). “We would have been in a really bad place if we’d worked with anyone else,” Goldwasser says. “Dave was almost like a father figure to us.” In late 2007, MGMT’s full-length album, Oracular Spectacular, was leaked online by Columbia and went on sale in January 2008 to positive reviews.
While MGMT is genuinely grateful for the opportunities they’ve been provided, the duo sometimes worries that the critical success is actually false. “Sometimes I worry that’s what’s happening to us. Or, what if all this really horrible stuff is actually good, and we're bad because we didn’t get five stars in Rolling Stone or whatever.”
Goldwasser, who lives in New Jersey and Vanwyngarden, who lives in Brooklyn, are disarming, smart, and clearly inventive. Goldwasser looks like the nice Jewish boy you could bring home to Mom and Dad, and Vanwyngarden seems like he time-traveled from 1967. He is honestly self-deprecating, saying the band’s music isn’t “completely mindless and stupid, but it’s not actually good or anything.”
The two have struck a mystic-nü-hippie/stoned-and-shirtless vibe in past press photos, and their youthful good looks combined with genuine weirdness bodes well for them in the record industry, at least in the short term. “We are pretty much a fluke, but a major-label fluke, and we really want to help bring weirdness and chaos back to major labels,” their press-kit manifesto reads. They talk about the album dealing with “current apocalyptic confusion” and reference the “underlying narrative of signing to a major label and leading fantasy rock star lives.”
Now that they’ve played Late Night with David Letterman and are part of the same Columbia roster that includes Beyoncé, Mariah Carey, and the Dixie Chicks, they can no longer play 15-minute sets in basements just to “be obnoxious,” as they said they did at Wesleyan. Now that they get paid to play, there’s no more sarcastic shows of singing over iPods while engaging in pseudo-performance-art types of activity just to make a spectacle, jumping off stuff onto each other, running around drunk and/or stoned, engaging the audience in some kind of colorful activity.
Goldwasser: People at Wesleyan were kind of aware of the outside world, but just in a way that was like "If I just follow my heart and do what I want to do I'll be useful in the real world.” And its like no, you’re not, useful, in the real world.
Vanwyngarden: That's why we got [especially] lucky, cause we're like Peter Pan.
Me: Yeah, you did get lucky! That’s great.
Vanwyngarden: We get to live in this little magical world we've made for ourselves.
Me: So what are you going to do after that, are you going to get a real job?
Vanwyngarden: [decisively] Well right now we don’t think there is an after. But I'd be cool with like being homeless, on the beach, with a dog, surfing.
So at least for the time being, until MGMT makes three more records for Columbia, Andrew Vanwyngarden will not have to live on the beach. He won’t be compelled to, anyway. That doesn’t mean it’s not still an option… “The whole world is fucked,” says Vanwyngarden. “That should be your sub-headline – ‘MGMT: the whole world is bullshit. Fuck everything.’ That’s what we wanted to call our album, Mystic Bullshit, but we knew it wouldn’t fly."
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Issue #35
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BrittanyJulious (7 months)
Nice!
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