MGMT - Kids
It's THAT song - everyone's favourite Love Will Tear us Apart rip off. 'Nuff said.
You were a child
Crawling on your knees toward him
Making momma so proud
But your voice is too loud
We like to watch you laughing
Picking insects off of plants
No time to think of consequences
MGMT seem to have a way of explaining childhood. This isn't a shock I suppose as they are barely grown up themselves. Although saying that they seem like the type of guys who would do something like dress up as a baby, insist on drinking all their drinks through baby's bottles and unlearning their toilet training in the name of post-modernity and pretention.
They make a footnote in this verse about enjoying a lack of consequence, through the example of picking insects off plants and laughing like idiots. I find this an enduring image and surely a metaphor for how they are ripping off the youth of today, (whom I'm sure they regard as insects in the midst of their swaggering artistic poncery) with colorful synth-muzac.
Control yourself
Take only what you need from him
A family of trees wanting to be haunted (?)
Control yourself
Take only what you need from him
To be blunt, this is nonsense. This has nothing to do with their dreams of regressing themselves, perhaps into specially built wombs built of papier-mâché and filled with warm Sunny Delight. They start off about self control, without elaborating what on earth they mean. They could have made a very bold statement against addiction there, but instead they start talking about a family of trees.
Now I don't know if tree's form into family units. I don't see how they can come together in celebration of two trees mating and forming a sapling, or celebrating said sapling's birthday. To be honest they never really redress the issue of tree families at all, which is quite a shame as I was hoping to find out if trees could form families (Lord of the Rings the two towers made a very convincing argument for this I feel).
The water is warm
But it's sending me shivers
A baby is born
Crying out for attention
Memories fade
Like looking through a fogged mirror
Decisions too
Decisions are made
Decisions are made and not bought
But I thought this wouldn't hurt a lot
I guess not
Ok so away from the utterly irrelevant chorus, and now the boys of The Management. Didn't you know that was their name before they turned it into a weak phonetic acronym? That must have won the kids through, after all kids love stuff that looks like txt spk dnt thy? English grammar complaints aside, the boys seem to be entering their self made wombs, and it sounds a lot like they've got the liquid temperature just right. Then they seem to rebirth themselves, which is interesting as this practice of being reborn is not as weird as you may think. In fact many people actually get into a water bath and then emerge from the water, as if being reborn. It's more symbolic than a literal rebirthing but it works for some.
I do think this whole thing kind of trivializes the whole birthing process, which as most of us know is a messy, painful experience for most of the people involved, which then becomes quite nice later, once the placenta is cleared away. However, MGMT neglect a lot of this with their lyrics which seem to have been thrown in to draw attention from how repetitive the song actually is. So they have Lyrics for the sake of it, eh? It sounds a lot like the Red Hot Chili Peppers to me in that sense, they just throw in a random selection of words which mean nothing to anyone, but I guess that's another story.
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