My Top 100, No. 51: "Kids" by MGMT

"Kids" is a pretty simple song, when you boil it down to the musical nuts and bolts. 

You've got the kick drum/snare drum backbeat, which, like so many great percussion parts, sounds like a persistent ogre beating a pig to death with a sledgehammer. You've got the main synth lead line, which starts out just being catchy but ends up having a familiar comforting quality. You've got the bass (I think?) doing its "ooh-wah ooh-wah ooh-wah" thing, which is always the part I sing along to. And finally, the repeated chorus line: "Control yourself / Take only what you need from it," which begs to be shout-sung by drunken undergraduates in the best tradition of Brand New's acoustic album-closers. MGMT shows off each of those parts individually, then layer them on top of each other, which is fairly straightforward compositional technique.

But despite being a pretty simple song, it's somehow become imbued with a very complicated emotional message.

MGMT is very much of its time--it was pretty transparently the kind of Millennial bullshit old people love to harp on, composed by two college kids I probably would've hated instinctively if I'd ever met them in real life. It just feels like something that you'd create if you're the kind of anarchist who'd be the first one to be killed if anyone actually dumped you into the State of Nature.

And I very much enjoyed Oracular Spectacular because it came out when I was a junior in college and therefore had a high tolerance for bullshit if it was fun. And most of the album's still fun, though "Kids" always left me feeling slightly unsettled. Like, it's obviously an up-and-at-em dance pop song, but it never really felt that happy.

Despite "Kids" being probably MGMT's biggest hit, the band hardly ever played it live--they'd put on the instrumental track and just sing along, karaoke-style--and it took them forever to put out a music video. For a long time, the iconic "Kids" video was a fan video with two people singing in face paint, but eventually, the band put out their own, which confirmed what I felt about the song. 

The other two big singles, "Time to Pretend" and "Electric Feel," got videos that were as psychedelic and orgiastic as you'd expect. Very much in keeping with the eat-fuckloads-of-shrooms-and-die-young aesthetic.

The video for "Kids," however, was about a toddler being tormented by monsters while his mother ignores his cries. It's deeply disturbing, and hits way closer to home with how this song makes me feel than an "Electric Feel"-style video would have.

I have no idea why any of that is the case, but it is.