'Kids' by MGMT

There has been this song which has been plaguing me for some weeks now. I usually am able to identify music when I can get some sense of it; some of the lyrics, when I can compare it to some other artist, or when I am able to glean some other kind of essence of the song. I do not have that Apple iPhone app which can identify a song and this song may not have been able to be identified in that way regardless.

The song was from the end-hour outro music for the Joe Crummey show on WABC radio in New York City. I was lucky enough to get to sit down with the host and interview him about two weeks ago. However during our interview I had forgotten to ask about the song. I had communicated with the host in the intervening time and this music was played every day. Still I thought that was sort of a silly question to ask over an email or on Facebook.

The other day though I was back inside the studio for another interview with WABC radios programming director Laurie Cantillo. I happened by the Crummey studio during their post-show powwow and I asked the host what the heck that song was.

I was expecting some obscure underground synth pop artist I had overlooked. Maybe it was Eno or something like that. Joe knew of the song very well actually. He knew what the song was but he could not pull the name of the tune. It was his engineers who had the information I was after.

This song was not the obscure song I thought though. MGMT is the name of the band; "Kids" is the name of the song. MGMT were the 2010 Grammy winners for artist of the year; the YouTube video for "Kids" has some 38 million hits. This was not exactly the obscure artist I had thought. Even my dear sweet wife who had puzzled over the tiny fragments of song allowed to the Joe Crummey show listener chimed in that the girl she trained to take over for her at her Pasadena Lush cosmetics store used to play MGMT all the time at work.

Crummey knew of this song apparently insofar as it played on his program and he had been one of the 35 million hits on this songs YouTube video. It is the strangest video you will ever see, intoned Crummey. Indeed the video version of the MGMT song "Kids" is a strange one.

At the same time an 80s synth pop sounding song sung by two kids in white face paint as they are singing about "a family of trees wanting to be haunted" is something in its own anyway.