MGMT: “Perez Hilton doesn’t know anything about music.”

Q and A

Two hours before their recent concert at the Bukit Kiara Indoor Arena, the psychedelic rock band MGMT – with founding members Benjamin Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden, and Matthew Asti, James Richardson, and Will Berman – get high on caffeine, trash the Hilton and talk about their new album.

ESQUIRE: How’s the tour? How’s the reception to Congratulations, almost one year to the day since it was released?

BENJAMIN GOLDWASSER: We’re on the home stretch. This is like the longest tour we’ve done, and it’s going really well. Reception has been great, people are really into the new stuff, and we’re playing in new places.
ANDREW VANWYNGARDEN: It’s like a fairytale. A year ago, so many people were hitting on us.

ESQ: Critics were saying that Congratulations was inaccessible, fans wouldn’t get it.

AW: People thought it was the end of MGMT, but they were wrong.

ESQ: You feel like giving them a metaphorical middle finger?

BG: Maybe even a real middle finger.
WILL BERMAN: Middle fingers that form into a giant Voltron robot that’s giving you the middle finger.

ESQ: Especially to Perez Hilton.

JAMES RICHARDSON: Perez Hilton doesn’t know anything about music. There, I said it. Put it in there [the magazine], I’m not scared. No really, he doesn’t know anything about good music.

ESQ: You’ve described Congratulations as ‘a complete body of songs’, but there are people who say that the album as an art form is dying. How do you respond to that?

AW: You can’t really say that, you make art and it’s an album, then it’s not dead.
JR: It assumes that music fans don’t really exist anymore and that people are, like, stupid and cheap and only listen to mainstream pop music. There are people who listen to whole albums. There are so many people who still listen to good music, there’s so much good music around, so it’s not as dire as people are making it out to be.
AW: It’s like any good form, you can revisit it again and again. You look back at the history of music, people have always done that. They take an old form and breathe new life into it.
WB: People are just saying that because of the way music is disseminated. The media is more geared towards listening to music in shorter blasts.
AW: It’s not like the painting is dead because of Photoshop (gives a look that screams ‘Did I just say that?”)
JR: Popular music started as a wave for revolutionary youth culture to put themselves out there, and that’s what made the album an art form, it meant something to those people. Now people say from a commercial perspective that ‘because albums aren’t selling, the album is dead’. That doesn’t make sense, really, because that’s not where it came from.
BG (turns to JR): Although when rock and roll got popular, it wasn’t from the album, it was from singles, it wasn’t until late 60s that…
JR: No, not saying that the album was the original art form, just saying that the reason why the album was considered an art form wasn’t because they were selling albums.
WB: I mean, when rock and roll started, people listened through radios and singles, people started getting their own stereos where they could listen to it [the album] front to back.
JR: I think when people say ‘the album is dead’, they’re talking about album-oriented rock radio.

ESQ: Do you look at the mega-success of Oracular Spectacular as a blessing or a curse, or a bit of both? You have previously railed against the popularity...

AW: We’re not against that, I think that’s a misconception of our band, that we aren’t happy with the success of the first album. I don’t know why we wouldn’t be. We made that album and felt 100 per cent good about it, and it did really well, and that’s pretty special. We made an honest musical statement, people liked it, and it was really successful. And that’s cool.
JR: 100 per cent a blessing.

ESQ: When it came to Oracular Spectacular, people labelled you guys a psychedelic pop band. But Congratulations has some straight-up rock songs. Do you see your band’s sound continually evolving?

AW: I don’t know, we listen to a lot of bands that have a catalogue of albums that can be completely different from album to album. Even someone like The Rolling Stones, started off with something really Beatles-y, but started to figure out their own thing. I don’t know, I think we just want to be one of those bands that can change from album to album and we’re still the same band.
BG: I think that’s where we get our musical inspiration from, from bands or musicians who make an art form out of having a whole career that is all contextual and changing, and less about looking at what’s popular and at all the hit singles that are out there, and trying to make something that sounds like that.

ESQ: So when you finish your tour, you’ll be working on your next album? Have you already started work on it?

AW: Not really.

ESQ: So the sound of it, you guys figuring it out?

AW: Yeah. I think (pauses) it’s going to be a happy album. Fun. It’s going to be a fun album.
JR: Fun and rewarding.
AW: With a capital ‘F’. (looks at my notebook, and points at me to write ‘fun’ with a capital F)

ESQ: Um yes, thank you. By the way, you guys recorded Congratulations in the woods, you should come record here, we have plenty of those.

AW: We like beach recordings too. Are there woods here?

ESQ: Oh yeah.

AW: Rainforests, right? (laughs) But we definitely want to come back here, we’ve kind of only seen the airport and this lovely complex-equestrian club. It’s really nice, but we haven’t really got any good idea of what Malaysia is like. Yeah, we should come back and record in the woods here, that’d be awesome.

ESQ: Last question, your music videos. You all have any personal favourites?

AW: My favourite is probably “Kids”.

ESQ: What happened to the baby? Is the baby fine?

AW: The baby is totally fine. He’s um… yeah, he’s fine.
JR: I think he can speak now. He has made huge developmental strides.
AW: I heard he’s much better at walking now.
WB: I personally like “Flash Delirium”.
AW: And the talking throat. (laughs)
BG: I actually like “Time to Pretend” alot, I was kind of sick of it for a while because it wasn’t current for us, we were doing other things. But it’s pretty neat really, I like it alot. I think it was cool how it all came together. None of us knew exactly what we were doing. It was a new experience.

Pictures courtesy of Sony Music.

March 30th, 2011