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12:21 · 2,210 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The founding joke is the whole story. Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser wrote Kids and Time to Pretend as parodies of pop and called themselves The Management to mock the industry's business side.
▶ 00:01:03
- Those jokes brought Columbia, Grammy nominations and a million copies sold, and the band spent the aftermath saying they had been attached to things they actually hate.
▶ 00:01:43
- They begged the label to leave Kids off the record, and Time to Pretend was reworked to suit radio, so the two songs that defined them were the two they least wanted there.
▶ 00:02:02
- The listening data proves the split: the three big singles have over 1.5 billion Spotify streams while the album's other seven tracks have 140 million between them.
▶ 00:02:19
- By the band's own account, Fourth Dimensional Transition and Of Moons, Birds and Monsters represent what they actually sound like, and neither has mainstream pull.
▶ 00:02:55
- For Congratulations they hired Pete Kember of Spacemen 3, which pushed the record further into psychedelia rather than back toward radio.
▶ 00:03:16
- Flash Delirium names Facebook and takes on what social networking does to people, and this is 2010, before Instagram or Snapchat existed.
▶ 00:03:58
- The band reject the uncommercial framing with a fact: the album went to number two on the Billboard chart, so whatever it was, it was not ignored.
▶ 00:07:06
- The sabotage story traces to one misquote. They told Q the album might turn out terrible, the magazine ran the headline as if they had called it terrible, and the self-sabotage reading grew from there.
▶ 00:10:18
- Their own summary of the trap: repeat the hits and get called unoriginal, depart from them and get accused of throwing away the audience, so somebody is disappointed either way.
▶ 00:11:12