Miller Chill

I'm pretty sick of negativity. Aren't you, friends?...(yes!). So I'm looking to lance one more massive, festering boil: my feelings in and around the band MGMT...MGMT consists (mostly) of two dudes, Ben Goldwasser (right), who I've never met (I think?), and Andrew VanWyngarden (left), who grew up right near me in Memphis. There have been a few other "touring members," like drummer Will Berman, who once propositioned me in a really gross and irritating way while wearing baby blue short-shorts.

Ben and Andrew met and began making music in the early aughts at Wesleyan University, where both were very close with one of Pillow and my Memphian sisters, L___. My relationship with Andrew went like this: he was the best friend of one of my mother's dearest friends' sons (lived across the street from them, around the corner/across the alley from us). I spent Thanksgiving with him once. He was cute and very quiet and two years older. He was a founding member of the high school band of choice for private school girls, the jammy, disorganized Accidental Mersh. Then, college. And he was tight with L___ and we spent New Years 2005 together. We ate pot brownies and drank canned beer and watched episodes of HBO's noise-porn docu-drama, Hookers at the Point. Again, he was very quiet, but not in the cute teenager way of that late 90s Thanksgiving. He was...an asshole? But (and let's keep this between us) so was L___. I'm not saying Wesleyan turned them into assholes (bound to happen eventually, etc.), but it allowed them to form a sort of myopic, self-aggrandizing bubble in the Connecticut wilderness where they could hone and project their asshole skills. And that's where Ben and the band came from, and now they're famous (and L___, a criminal social climber, is thrilled to the gills), and that "asshole bubble" stuff that killed me then, really kills me now that it's on MTV and stuff.

In 2004-5-6, while the Wesleyan set were roaming about glorified dorms or friends' houses on the Cape (bubble!) in manicured "outfits" (read: COSTUMES) doing coke and acid, I was on the ground in New York and then Memphis and sometimes abroad (read: Atlantic City) doing the same, but with real people (many people, different people each night) with better clothes and unpretentious hair and feelings and such. I thought, "those liberal arts kids and their hipster Melrose Place are ridiculous and oh-so transparently out of touch/limited." In my rough and tumble, rock n' roll disco world, they wouldn't have cut it--they were pansies and THEY WERE TRYING (a thing I had been taught not to EVER be caught doing). So I assumed they would all suffer some massive come-down upon graduation.

But no. It was me who had been unknowingly attending the wake of a certain generation of skater/junkie/dj's and club kid/bar wench/prop stylists. MGMT and the other Wesleyan kids they were friends with represented future generations (just check how young their fanbase is). They were like Cory Kennedy or something, like anyone who was happy to be caught trying, like anyone who actually thought photographs from "last night" were more important (more marketable) than the night itself. They were ready to say, "Yes!! We are hipsters!! And we want to make money being hipsters!! We want attention!! We care only for surfaces, and know full well that none of our shtick is new news!! Oh, the preening!!" As a student of the older generations, I was--still am--alarmed by these missions/admissions, alarmed by this market-conscious brand of hipsterdom, these "huppies."

But am I jealous? A little, surely. Plus, it's always weird when people you knew before they were famous become famous (far weirder than when you meet and get to know those who you once only knew as distant celebrities, or demi-celebrities).

And MGMT sounds good. I've known that all along. They're capable of producing very solid pop. Until last night, when I sat down to tackle the problem over Tecates with Pillow and YouTube and various lyrics-collecting sites, I thought my beef with them was only down to my petty jealousies, a lingering schooldays competition with L___. However, upon review of two music videos and one set of lyrics, I realized that MGMT would bother me regardless of personal ties. They are, in fact, the apotheosis of so much irksomeness.

Note:
The video for "Time to Pretend."
And the lyrics--
I'm Feelin rough I'm Feelin raw I'm in the prime of my life. Let's make some music make some money find some models for wives. I'll move to Paris, shoot some heroin and fuck with the stars. You man the island and the cocaine and the elegant cars. This is our decision to live fast and die young. We've got the vision, now let's have some fun. Yeah it's overwhelming, but what else can we do? Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute? Forget about our mothers and our friends. We were fated to pretend. I'll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms. I'll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world. I'll miss my sister, miss my father, miss my dog and my home. Yeah I'll miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone. But there is really nothing, nothing we can do. Love must be forgotten. Life can always start up anew. The models will have children, we'll get a divorce, we'll find some more models, Everything must run its course. We'll choke on our vomit and that will be the end. We were fated to pretend.

Pillow's brilliant reaction to these two cultural objects: "Autoerotic asphyxiation!--masturbation and suicide--autoerotic asphyxiation! And what are you doing talking about heroin, Andrew? And death, they're talking about death. I take that personally." As ever, she is 100% correct. There's the stuff I take personally too. The acid. Acid has been my spiritual life for years now. So, it's disheartening to watch Andrew sell it, cleverly, mechanically, Mad Ave.-ily provide the first wave of tweens-cum-teens their very own (completely disingenuous and obviobvi) psychedelic revival. And then, the Mexican ruins! I took acid in Mexican ruins last year and made BFA work about it. Dammit. And the cats. The cats! And the gayness! Once, my tweeish, hipstery manfriend was having a nervous breakdown and started to borrow my clothes and that is exactly what MGMT looks like: him, all certifiable in my embroidered silk scarf. Meltdown. War. Turmoil. And the stuff about having a commute. I mean, fuck you dude.

Is "Time to Pretend" a joke? Is it meant to parody this specific sort of American dream? Or are they serious? Either way, it--all of it--is cold and full of critical distance, as shallow as a "huppie," presumably, as shallow as its makers. They are smart, book-smart. They know all about criticality, and might, maybe pull it off...but they're dressed for Halloween. Oh, it's so flimsy. After our confab, Pillow and I went into the kitchen to prepare a bit of food. I put on Lucinda Williams' Sweet Old World. I said, "MGMT will never make something like this. It's too warm, too authentic and messy for them. They will never be able to make me cry, and so...I'll never love them."