(Mom + Pop)
The newly viral US duo seem to take inspiration from Bowie, Simon and Garfunkel and the Gallagher brothers on an album of glossy, impressively melodic psychedelic pop
In 2021, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue published a report on extremist activity on TikTok. It made for thoroughly depressing reading, spiked with moments of incredulity. Chief among the latter was the apparent popularity of the title track of MGMT’s fourth album, 2018’s Little Dark Age, with neo-Nazis: it was “by far the most popular sound among extremist creators on TikTok”, soundtracking videos about the late American white supremacist George Lincoln Rockwell and “esoteric nazism”. The report’s authors seemed baffled as to why. Certainly, its adoption doesn’t say much for your average neo-Nazi’s ability to understand English. Little Dark Age’s lyrics are, fairly obviously, an excoriation of Trump-era America and racist police violence. You could even suggest they weirdly presage the Black Lives Matter protests: “Just know that if you hide, it doesn’t go away,” they warn, before suggesting listeners “get out of bed … bring a stone, all the rage”.
In truth, the improbable co-option of the song was probably just an extension of its general surge in popularity on TikTok. A single that had failed to make the charts, from an album that barely scraped the US Top 40, by a band who reached their commercial peak nearly 15 years ago, Little Dark Age suddenly became ubiquitous on the video-sharing platform during the pandemic. And it still is, providing the musical accompaniment to everything from girls in kitten ears dancing, to footage of the war in Ukraine, to – yes – videos complaining about Little Dark Age’s ubiquity on TikTok. Now, 5.5m TikTok videos and nearly 600m Spotify streams later, MGMT’s profile is higher than at any point since their 2007 debut album Oracular Spectacular went from critical cause célèbre to mainstream commercial success, selling more than a million copies in the process.
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