Perhaps the first major turning-point in this foment came in 2007 with MGMT’s first and only good record, Oracular Spectacular. Nowadays their music is the kind of thing that shows up in films when people try to do a Naughties period piece (see: Saltburn), and their highest Spotify stream counts are in the billions. MGMT had a relatively big success at the time for the kind of group they were (indie-coded but really on a major label), and Pitchfork itself didn’t quite approve. “Kids” ended up on Gossip Girl, went to #91 on Billboard, becoming a kind of sleeper anthem. The record itself went to #38 on the album charts. These days I find the record charming, often dated, except for those justifiably beloved singles: “Kids,” “Electric Feel,” and especially “Time to Pretend,” which is one of the great Millennial pop songs. I felt as much when I first heard it: finally, here was something that didn’t sound like any other era, that belonged to the young people of its own time. Plus it sounded great. Though that hardly mattered in 2007: “Time to Pretend” didn’t even crack the Billboard Top 100. I still harbor a fantasy where it was as big a hit that year as “Irreplaceable” or “Umbrella”— good pop songs to be sure, but ones that now sound completely of their time, while “Time to Pretend” feels outside it. In fact I might just be hitting on one main difference between truly great Millennial pop and the stuff mass audiences were listening to: it signifies its time, but isn’t trapped by it.
This fantasy of mine is, essentially, where my present canon begins. Since there’s nothing which actually separates a song like “Time to Pretend” from the big hits of its time, only that it was produced differently. Yet it’s just as anthemic, memorable, catchy, and totally accessible. But it has little to do with the flattened-out, dumbed-down, dynamic-free landscape perfected by mega-producers from Max Martin to Benny Blanco. Not only is it nearly impossible for an artist to crash the pop charts in this century without the backing of the industry’s biggest monopolies—would audiences really know what to do with something like that if they heard it? Audiences need to listen to something a lot in order to get used to it, and eventually to prefer it. The whole scheme of the music industry relies on the assumption that audiences are essentially passive and will accept whatever is given to them. One of the dirty tricks of the “poptimist” turn in music journalism is that it gives audiences tacit permission to accept passivity in the name of fighting snobbery. But every snob has always wished the radios of the world could be filled with songs like “Time to Pretend,” instead of songs like Jason Mraz’s interminable “I’m Yours.” Yet mass audiences—unfortunately, painfully—have tended to prefer the latter. I often suspect it’s simply because they’re so rarely given an actual alternative. (Then again, in 1965—a year that gave us “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Norwegian Wood,” “My Girl,” and “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”—the number one song was a little ditty called “Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs; maybe things never change.)