The first bands MGMT fell in love with: “Incredible”
MGMT’s most viral moment of the past year wasn’t tied to the release of their latest album, 2024’s Loss of Life, but to the resurfaced video of the group playing a fledgling version of their biggest hit, ‘Kids’, at a tiny outdoor concert on their Connecticut college campus in 2003, some five years before the song broke out as an indie rock anthem.
In that video, the duo of Andrew VanWyngarden and Benjamin Goldwasser – both students in their early 20s at the time – were blissfully unaware of the nest egg they were already sitting on. While ‘Kids’ was fairly recognisable already with its punchy synth-line, the band’s approach to music was decidedly less art-rock-disco at that point and more university keg party vibes; with a documented lean toward satirical, jokey pop songs and antics, such as playing the Ghostbusters theme song repeatedly for the entirety of one of their sets.
It’s not that VanWyngarden and Goldwasser weren’t serious in their early days. How could you not be serious with names like that? It’s more than the two musicians, in the midst of a crisis of self-consciousness familiar to many 21-year-olds, had decided to rebel against themselves and their own high-brow musical instincts.
“In high school, I came from this jazzy prog rock thing that I was into, and there was a certain moment where I was thinking that it was uncool to be into that,” Goldwasser acknowledged in a 2024 chat with Tape Op. “That’s when I started getting into The Velvet Underground, Kraut rock, and stuff like that—super minimal, one note solos.”
Basically, MGMT had sprouted from the idea that minimalism and restraint were the best policies for a musician tempted by the misguided outlandishness of the prog rock and jazz fusion they secretly liked. Long, impressive solos were immature; one sustained tone was cool. In a similar way, they were so concerned with the sin of taking themselves too seriously that they refused to perform most of their early songs without either adding a comedic element to the vocals or dancing around like idiots, such as in the 2003 ‘Kids’ video.
“We would wear sunglasses and fur jackets and pose like rock stars as a complete ironic thing,” VanWyngarden told Uproxx in 2018, with Goldwasser adding, “We were victims of our own irony in a way.”
All of these attitudes slowly began to change as MGMT rounded into form and continued to develop their legitimate technical skills as musicians, making it increasingly ridiculous to keep treating their craft and their early inspirations as a joke.
“I’ve come full circle now,” Goldwasser, now 42, said last year while promoting Loss of Life, referring to his renewed interest in those serious bands of his youth. “I don’t care about what’s cool at all, and I’ve come back to a lot of that music. King Crimson was my favourite band in high school. I just watched the screening of the King Crimson documentary [In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50], and it’s incredible.”
From a 1969 perspective, the nerdy prog-rock godfathers of King Crimson might have seemed as far away as possible from the Warhol-backed artistes in the Velvet Underground. A tightly-produced, jazz-inflected, solo-heavy song like ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’ bears no immediate resemblance to a loose DIY glockenspiel nugget like ‘Sunday Morning’. As we continue to move further away from the original context of what those two bands represented in their own time, however, and just float around together in the giant digital pool of all music everywhere at once, King Crimson is deservedly reclaiming their coolness, and MGMT – finally serious, middle-aged men themselves – can only become cooler by association.
