Citing Joel Stein’s recent article in Time Magazine, which derided today’s youth for being “lazy, entitled, selfish and shallow,” MGMT frontman Andrew VanWyngarden elaborated on his band’s refusal to play hit single “Kids” at the recent Frost Music and Arts Festival when reached for comment. VanWyngarden was adamant, stating that, “Frankly, today’s youth is just not as deserving of the spirit of enterprise and endeavor which we were tapping into when we released ‘Kids’ five years ago. We’ve grown up, but this generation hasn’t.
Wesleyan in 2005 was a completely different age. If we’re Generation Y, then these guys are just Generation Y Not.
Always so demanding, expecting us to play our popular songs like some sort of band.”
Although many Stanford students expressed distaste for MGMT’s encore, stating that it was a very self-congratulatory performance, VanWyngarden was unfazed. He went on to say, “Things have changed so much in the past five years that we couldn’t have lived with ourselves if we had played ‘Kids’.
It just doesn’t speak to the same group of people we had intended it to. People Instagram our concerts now, they use Facebook Graph Search, they text. It’s a disgrace.”
VanWyngarden also referred to other changes in the band’s outlook over the years, noting that the band’s crowds had become much smaller in recent years and so they had switched to a more introspective set. Keyboard player Benjamin Goldwasser also added, “We want to play the music of 2013. No more, no less. Asking us to play ‘Kids’ would be like asking The Rolling Stones to play ‘Gimme Shelter’. Ridiculous, right?”
Following on from these feelings of disappointment in today’s youth, who Stein termed ‘narcissistic and materialistic’, MGMT have since announced that their upcoming album will be entirely composed of a series of covers of classical lute music. We await it with bated breath.
