If you’re even a casual MGMT fan, there’s a good chance you’ve heard the lore about their hit single “Kids,” that they wrote it as students at Wesleyan University and considered it kind of a joke song, not representative of their most prominent musical interests, which at this point they’ve spent the majority of their career exploring. And if you’ve ever wondered what it would have been like to see MGMT as college kids, performing that future hit on their campus to fellow students who had no idea they were witnessing history in the making, you’re in luck. YouTuber Rad Scientist, a former classmate of MGMT’s, uploaded never-before-seen footage of MGMT performing the song at a 2003 concert for Wesleyan’s annual Zonker Harris Day back when they were still called The Management, two years before they released the song on their Time To Pretend EP, four years before they released the album version on Oracular Spectacular, and five years before they released “Kids” as a single and began their ascent to indie stardom. Rad Scientist says they recently found the footage “on an old drive I thought was gone forever.”
MGMT’s core duo of Andrew VanWyngarden and Benjamin Goldwasser performed it on their own, with just an electronics board and their own voices, and without any of the live members who joined later on, and it’s pretty amazing to watch. Andrew and Ben were clearly having a ton of fun, smiling to themselves, writhing around on stage, “hand-syncing” the pre-recorded synth solo, and then running around the Wesleyan grounds with giant tree branches in their hands during a lengthy instrumental break, before arriving back on stage to sing the final chorus.
Rad Scientist also uploaded other clips from their set, including one of the duo covering the Talking Heads‘ “This Must Be the Place” with Andrew on guitar and Ben on synths, and one of them playing the early MGMT song “Money to Burn” that appeared on their 2005 demo album Climbing to New Lows. They also did something called “Funky Legal Beats,” which Rad Scientist says had Ben “sampling a live FM radio over records of a dialysis report on vinyl,” and a song that their friend Mike sang called “I Am One of the Smartest Apes in the World” that uses the same synth line as the Climbing to New Lows song “The Kids Quartet.” Rad Scientist also uploaded video of MGMT jamming on a balcony on campus.
“We used to think about how to make the most stereotypical pop song and that’s one of the ones we did,” Andrew once told Q magazine about “Kids.” Ben told The Independent that the song “was a result of us being 19 years old, in this fantasy college world, which is a little bit like childhood because you don’t have much responsibility.”
In a 2010 Mojo interview, Andrew said that Ben “wrote the music for ‘Kids’ when he was 19, drunk in his dorm room. Then I wrote the lyrics on my 20th birthday, the night that we were gonna play it to people for the first time. I know that they’re vaguely inspired by David Byrne’s nostalgic lyrics, but it doesn’t make any sense.”
“I remember that I was thinking about musicians as having this big voice, and what are they gonna do with it?,” he continued. “I was thinking we’d get everybody to realize that we’re all little kids at some point – people that are evil and doing hideous stuff right now, like George Bush or whoever, they were once little innocent beings. Something simple like that. I’m glad that people like it. It’s a catchy song.”
Some clips of the “Kids” have been circulating on social media since it was uploaded, but you really have to watch the full 7-minute video if you haven’t already, along with all these other goodies.
Check out the clips below, and watch the balcony jam (which isn’t embeddable) here.