MGMT’s music has grown exponentially in popularity considering how much of a throwback it is. Think The Darkness, a Queen-esque band with a 70’s rock feel, circa 2003. Many people have said MGMT’s music reminds them of 70’s disco/pyschedelia. To me, it’s surprisingly addictive considering how much I hate psychedelic music from the 1960’s and 1970’s. Their music simply won’t leave my brain, though, months and months after it was first released. MGMT’s music videos are pretty all-over-the-place if innocuous, definitely following the psychedelic trend: crazy colors, warped perspective, random flying objects…
But MGMT’s new video for their thoroughly-addictive single “Kids” is just asking for trouble. You can check it out here.
The premise of the video follows a toddler as he is tormented by horrific monsters and zombie-like creatures in his crib, and later, on the street after his mother drops him (literally!) so she can text on her Blackberry. I’m guessing the little boy is about one year old, and is obviously terrified considering he spends most of the video in tears, especially when handled or approached by the creatures. The video continues down this path, then descends into MGMT’s expected psychedelia with a few minutes of animation that culminate with the tot being dropped down a black hole.
What??
Initially I had no issue with this video, until I thought about it a bit more. At one or two, this young boy isn’t acting — he’s definitely scared. Certainly you can make the argument that he won’t remember this faux trauma as he grows up, but that’s easily contradicted. For example: When I was one or two, my mother left me with a family friend for the night. I distinctly remember being in a crib in their living room and beginning to feel feverish and sick. I felt horrible and cried all night, but no one would come to help me — presumably because they thought I was still learning to sleep by myself. But that memory has stuck with me, even now, in my mid-20’s. How can this child be expected to forget these horrid monsters? And the worst part? They’re not in his imagination. They are real, and taunting him. At the very least, he’ll have nightmares until he is forced to face his fears.
I also realized, almost instantaneously, that the MGMT “Kids” video felt suspiciously like the Australian anti-smoking commercial that was released a few months ago:
The backlash regarding that commercial was remarkable. People flipped their lids! Obviously, the little boy in the commercial was alone in a crowded train station, left to believe his mother was gone. Certainly he was upset, but children lose parents momentarily all the time, and vice-versa. Depending on how responsible the parent is, that can be a day-to-day occurrence. I lived with the fear as a young girl that my mom would disappear, and a few times we lost each other for a split second in crowded places, but that is life. Monsters are not, at least not the kind with giant claws that chase after children. It’s also important to remember that even though the anti-smoking commercial got a lot of flack for deliberately terrifying a child, it did serve an important purpose — it’s message hit home with lots of people, touched the psyches of mothers all over the place, and perhaps it inspired a few to quit smoking.
So what about the MGMT video? What’s the message there? You could argue that perhaps the boy sees people in the outside world as monsters, and that he lives with the fear of someone who has not yet learned that not everyone is out to get him. At one point, a monster dressed as a mailman picks up the boy and hands him back to his mother, and he cries the whole time. Who’s to say the boy wouldn’t do that with a normal looking mailman? I get that MGMT wanted the authentic and distilled fear of a one or two year old, but their video leaves me feeling a little… sour. Not infuriated, not sad, just, as Michael Kors would say in Project Runway, underwhelmed.
