MGMT: The Management Is Still In Charge

MGMT’s first appearance on the music scene was as unexpected as it was uncompromising. Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser showed up at a Wesleyan University college party as an inauspicious duo called “The Management,” playing nothing but a continuous loop of the Ghostbusters theme song for hours. The idea was to mock the pop culture music scene, mostly through the uses of irony and satire. Subsequent performances consisted of the boys dressing up in costumes, hitting each other with plastic dinosaurs, and running out of shows for no apparent reason whatsoever. As VanWyngarden explains in an interview for honoluluadviser.com, “We acted like pop stars on our campus of 3,000 people. We would play little living room parties and act like we were playing stadiums. It was all part of the joke.”

Needless to say, some mistook MGMT’s behavior as an insincere attack on the human experience, but the group was mostly just savaging Hollywood and the music industry while having some fun in the process, and a growing body of loyal fans got this. MGMT’s breakthrough came with the release of their 2007 hit album Oracular Spectacular, a manifestation of what most consider the “classic MGMT sound,” with such songs as “Kids,” “Time to Pretend,” and “Electric Feel” defining the group’s early identity. Heavy pop-synth and electro-funk rip through the chord progressions of each song, accompanying a lyrical exploration of themes like self-destructive rock behavior, a longing for the bygone days of childhood, and the myriad traps set by the average American lifestyle.

Despite Oracular Spectacular’s persistently sarcastic tone, sincerity and optimism often define the album’s message. “Time to Pretend,” a song that parodies the fast-paced, glamour-driven pursuits of the average musician, still manages to catch us off guard when it sums up the nostalgic grip we tend to maintain over our early childhood years. So, though we may not identify with the trials of the binge-drinking, model-marrying, heroin-shooting legends of the rock ‘n’ roll genre, we can still find a kind of solace within the lyrics of a song that chronicles all of these in an elegantly melodic, even elegiac, manner.

As often happens with visionary artists, following the success of their first album, MGMT began to develop a much more experimental sound, both lyrically and stylistically, and gradually, the audience morphed, too. Congratulations, released in 2010, represented a more progressive and psychedelic sound than its predecessor. As a result, MGMT’s American fan base dwindled. To Goldwasser and VanWyngarden, alienation had become a familiar feeling since experiencing the rapid success of Oracular Spectacular. They both point out that after the success of their first album, interviewers were disturbingly unified in their anticipation that the next album would fall short of the success that the former had achieved.