The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Friday, February 16, 2018 — 5

In retrospect, there was 
little that would have predicted 
the enormous reach of MGMT. 
The American duo exploded 
onto the scene in 2007 with 
Oracular 
Spectacular, 
an 
electropop tour de force that 
artists have continued to bite 
from a decade later. Oracular 
paved the way for the cheerful 
indie bands of later years, like 
Grouplove and Passion Pit, and 
that sound influenced a whole 
range of genres. Frank Ocean 
covered them; so did Katy 
Perry.
That debut is still their 
defining album, propelled by 
the popularity of its singles. 
Nearly every millennial will 
recognize 
the 
simple 
bass 
line of “Electric Feel,” the 
dance-party-ready “Kids,” the 
exuberant opening chords on 
“Time to Pretend.” If that was 
your last point of contact with 
the band, their newest, Little 
Dark Age, will surprise with its 
subtler soundscape. The huge 
choruses and high pitched 
vocals of their earlier years 
are absent, replaced by more 
fully formed, impressionistic 
productions. 
They 
sound 
closer to their ’80s electropop 
predecessors — New Order, 
Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode — 
than ever before.

The title track was their first 
single, released back in Oct., 
and it immediately signaled a 
shift. The track starts quietly, 
then builds into a dark march 
of a chorus. There is a clear 
goth lineage here, with distant 
and moody vocals delivering 
statements of hazy disaffection 
like “Breathing in the dark” and 
“I grieve in stereo.” Suddenly 
that Bauhaus cover they did 

back in 2011 makes a lot of 
sense. MGMT have always 
written sad songs; they’ve just 
covered them up with a lot of 
excited synths. On “Little Dark 
Age,” their production matches 
their brooding mood exactly. 
The effect is one of the best 
singles released by the band 
since their debut, and a clear 
stand out on the album. They’re 
not a totally new band — just 
more matured, growing into 
themselves.
In reality, MGMT never 
wanted 
to 
be 
pop. 
They 
were aiming for the more 
experimental 
and 
ambient 
(hell, they have a song called 
“Brian Eno”), but they didn’t 
quite succeed, and so ended 
up with a huge commercial 

success on their hands. They’ve 
thankfully realized that ’80s 
revival is more their game. You 
can hear this on the opener, 
“She Works Out Too Much,” a 
slightly creepy track about a 
couple obsessed with working 
out on which the band literally 
welcomes us to the “shitshow” 
in 
verse 
two 
— 
“Grab 
a 
comfortable seat,” they add.
It’s not all gloom. “Me and 
Michael” is a flirty track about 
friendship 
so 
powerful 
it 
reaches the romantic, and with 
its driving bass, pretty synth 
lines and ecstatic chorus, it’s 
one of the most addicting on the 
album, and a clear reference to 
their synth-pop influencers. 
It would be quite at home on a 
Walkman.
There are moments on this 
album which become tiring, 
and it can be a bit repetitive. 
By “James,” there’s a sense that 
a different sound is needed to 
cleanse the palette, but they 
don’t reach that sound until 
the closer, “Hand It Over,” a 
slow-moving love song that 
recalls Tame Impala in their 
more pensive moments. On the 
flip side, they’ve created one of 
their most cohesive works in 
probably a decade. That synth-
pop is currently having a huge 
resurgence means that MGMT 
are once again at the right place 
at the right time. And all the 
while, they’re still just doing 
them.

MGMT refines its sound 
with new ‘Little Dark Age’

MATT GALLATIN
Daily Arts Writer

COLUMBIA RECORDS 

MUSIC ALBUM REVIEW

 The late 2010s could appro-
priately be called, “The Age 
of A24,” with major critical 
acclaim following releases 
such as “The Lobster,” “Moon-
light,” “Room” and “Lady 
Bird.” With the new trailer for 
one of the company’s first 2018 
releases, “Hereditary,” it seems 
like the indie studio has no 
plans of slowing down.
 One achievement is the 
trailer’s ability to convey just 
enough about the film’s plot to 
intrigue without giving any-
thing away. Viewers finish the 
trailer with a gist of what the 
film is about — a creepy family 
dealing with some less-than-
ideal common behaviors — but 
don’t have quite enough infor-
mation to figure out how the 

film will play out.
 Scored to sparse, dissonant 
strings and ominous plucking 
sounds, the trailer does a tre-
mendous job of unsettling the 

viewer from the start and, for 
the rest of the runtime, draw-
ing that tension to an unbear-
ably chilling head. One of the 
most jarring elements of the 
trailer is the suddenness with 
which everything seems to be 
happening, seeing a shot of a 
house in the daytime suddenly 
pop into nighttime.
 Perhaps the only concern 

that arises from the trailer for 
“Hereditary” is the possibility 
that it won’t be representa-
tive of the tone and pace of 
the film. The trailer for 2016’s 
“The Witch” comes to mind 
as an example of a trailer that 
portrayed the film as a terrify-
ing thrill ride rather than the 
slow-burn atmospheric chiller 
it ended up being. “The Witch” 
was still a great film, although 
the disconnect between the 
film audiences was advertised 
and the film audiences saw 
likely hurt its overall recep-
tion. The trailer for “Heredi-
tary” looks as if it could hit 
similar beats.

– Max Michalsky, 
Daily Arts Writer

TRAILER REVIEW: A24’S ‘HEREDITARY’

“Hereditary”

A24

A24

Little Dark Age

MGMT

Columbia Records

The issue of sexual assault 
in 
the 
workplace 
— 
and 
Hollywood specifically — feels 
kaleidoscopic. By the time you 
write about an aspect of it, 
everyone’s focus has shifted 
onto another angle. Another 
scandal has suddenly aired, 
and you have to update your 
argument 
and 
stretch 
your 
perspective to make it elastic 
enough to encompass all that you 
want to say. It feels paradoxical: 
Write about all of it, and you risk 
sounding hopeless and banal, 
offering nothing with nuance 
or originality. Write about only 
one part, and you risk sounding 
reductive.
This is not a column about 
the trajectory of the #MeToo 
movement and the backlash 
against 
it 
as 
a 
whole; 
I 
haven’t quite mapped out the 
constellation I want to trace 
there yet. This is a column about 
the difference between reading 
minds 
and 
turning 
down 
mashed potatoes politely at your 
aunt’s house.
On 
Jan. 
14th, 
Babe.net 
published a story about an 
anonymous woman’s date and 
subsequent sexual encounter 
with actor Aziz Ansari in Sept. 
“Grace” felt that upon making it 
back to his TriBeCa apartment 
after their weird date, Ansari 
repeatedly ignored her verbal 
and non-verbal cues that she 
was 
highly 
uncomfortable 
and wanted him to stop his 
behavior. She felt coerced and 
violated, and told him so over 
text afterwards, telling him to 
be more mindful in the future. 
He apologized but indicated 
he felt everything was fun and 
consensual. His outspoken and 
lauded support of the #MeToo 
and Time’s Up movements made 
Grace want to tell her story.
Was it assault? Or bad sex?
This is the question that 
preoccupied 
and 
obsessed 
every conservative pop culture 
pundit, every feminist and anti-
feminist in the blogosphere, 
academics 
and 
TV 
critics 
alike. 
The 
website 
Jezebel 
published a rejoinder titled 
“Babe, What are you Doing?” 
noting that “a side effect of the 
tidal wave of sexual assault and 
harassment 
reporting 
since 
Oct. is that, having been long 
confined to explicitly feminist 
outlets, reporting about sexual 
impropriety is, all of a sudden, 
considered 
general-interest 
prestige reporting.” Jezebel was 
cynical about the fact that Babe 
had approached Grace rather 
than the other way around, 
and condemned some of the 
amateurish mistakes of the 

inexperienced writer.
Babe majorly screwed up the 
execution and writing of this 
story. But regrettable as this 
may be, what is almost worse 
is how the botching of this 
story bolstered one of the most 

insidious false arguments that 
people who defend the men in 
stories like this one fall back on: 
That we can’t expect or assume 
men to be mind-readers.
Caitlin Flanagan dubbed the 
Babe article “revenge porn,” 
writing that the anonymous 
woman and the author of the 

article “may have destroyed 
Ansari’s career, which is now 
the punishment for every kind 
of male sexual misconduct, 
from the grotesque to the 
disappointing.” On Jan. 15th, 
Bari Weiss wrote an op-ed titled 
“Aziz Ansari is Guilty. Of Not 
Being a Mindreader.” Each of 
these arguments are built on 
pillars that aren’t as concrete 
as their authors clearly believe 
them to be, but that’s another 
story — though for what it’s 
worth, I think Jezebel’s article 
is highly worth reading for how 
it points out flaws in Flanagan’s 
argument alone.
Many, like Tucker Carlson 
and Ben Shapiro, argue that the 
#MeToo movement is reaching 
too far; that yes, sexual assault 
is bad, but innocent men are 
being dragged under for small 
actions or not being able to 
easily pick up on every clue. To 
them, it is a wildfire spreading 
out of control. The assumption 
that men should always be able 
to pick up on clues is expecting 
too much. They are sympathetic 
to the plight of single (well, not 
always) men in this day and age: 
The conflation of misreading 
mixed signals and rape is 
striking fear into the hearts of 
all our warm-blooded American 
males.
Part of what is so discomfiting 
about stories like Ansari’s — 
and Louis C.K.’s, incidentally 
— is some of these guys have 
crafted personas as men who 
can understand and articulate 
the nuanced ways in which men 
diminish and dismiss women. 
Their comedy often depends 
on it. Until these stories come 
out, they’re praised for their 
awareness. If they can build 
reputations, make money and 
garner praise from being able 
to pick up on subtle cues — how 
can they be missing signals in 
their own real life?
In 1999, Celia Kitzinger and 
Hannah Frith (of Loughborough 
University and University of 
the West of England) wrote an 
article titled “Just say no? The 
use of conversation analysis 
in 
developing 
a 
feminist 
perspective on sexual refusal.” 
In it, they argue that refusals 
in general — not just those 
centered around sex — are 
often complex conversational 
interactions. In other words, 
we are constantly in situations 
in which we prefer to say no 
rather than yes: turning down 
an invitation to a party where 
we know we won’t have fun, 
passing on a lunch date with 
a coworker we abhor, turning 
down a second serving of your 
lovely aunt’s horrible mashed 
potatoes. We say things like, 
“Oh I would, but I don’t know 
many people there,” or “I’ve got 
a lot of work to do, how about in 
a few weeks?” or “Thanks, Aunt 
Margaret, but I’m trying to cut 
down on carbs.” For the most 
part, we all understand how a 
polite or evasive refusal works. 
We give and get them all the 
time.
The point of this article, in 
1999, was that it should not 
be necessary for a woman to 

explicitly say “no” in order 
for their refusal of a sex act 
to be understood. The focus 
on “just say no” implied that 
other forms of refusal were 
open to reasonable doubt, a 
weakness that was and has been 
exploited 
historically 
inside 
and outside of the courtroom 
in the dissmissal of women’s 
testimonies about assault and 
rape. They argued that the focus 
on rape prevention shouldn’t 
be so centered on refusal skills 
or assertiveness training. (This 
is a vast oversimplification of a 
tightly written 24 pages full of 
comprehensive research, but a 
full pdf of it is available online).
While tactics like “just say 
no” have since evolved into 
mantras such as “yes means 
yes,” (many of which have 
culminated in the kind of 
university affirmative consent 
policies that are ridiculously 
impossible to enforce), the point 
still stands: The expectation 
that men should be able to 
pick up on obvious indicators 
of discomfort — verbal or 
nonverbal — is not going too far. 
It’s an attempt to demystify the 
boundaries of consent that seem 

to be bewilderingly murky to so 
many men in this area alone. 
It would be foolish to think, 
by the way, that the horror 
over expecting men to pick up 
on — and then acknowledge 
and react accordingly — to 
cues of discomfort has nothing 
to do with the rich history 
of 
the 
sexualization 
and 
romanticization of the explicit 
lack of consent seen in the films 
and TV shows we voraciously 
consume as a nation. How 
many film scenes can you think 
of where a woman is yelling 
at a man, who then stops 
her by grabbing and kissing 
her? How many times does 
she then melt into his arms? 
(Though vaguely outdated now, 
I recommend a documentary 
called “Miss Representation,” 
a 2011 Sundance Film Festival 
Official Selection that captures 
how attitudes in the media 
filters into and shapes our 
collective 
consciousness). 
Besides, we understand hints, 
suggestions and evasive ways 
of communicating when they’re 
meant to signify interest, rather 
than a lack thereof: When 
someone says I love you without 
actually saying “I love you.” “If 
you’re a bird, I’m a bird.” (“The 
Notebook”). “As you wish.” 
(“The Princess Bride”). You get 
the point.
Perhaps the most visceral 
image in Grace’s story is a 
description of one of Ansari’s 
repeated moves: sticking his 
fingers into her mouth. If you 
are in that close proximity to 
another person’s body — so 
intimately involved with them 
— and you are unable to tell 
they 
aren’t 
enthusiastically 
into it, you shouldn’t be having 
sex. So for the people who will 
read this (and pieces like this) 
and still protest about innocent 
men 
misreading 
signals 
— 
chances are, if you’re really that 
fantastically awful at reading 
body language, you’re probably 
not great in bed anyway.

Sophia Kaufman:
It’s time to take a hint 

GENDER & MEDIA COLUMN

SOPHIA 
KAUFMAN

The case of Aziz Ansari outside the #MeToo movement and
the implicit expectations of reading signs and taking a hint

The issue of 

sexual assault in 

the workplace — 

and Hollywood 

specifically — feels 

kaleidoscopic. By 

the time you write 

about an aspect 

of it, everyone’s 

focus has shifted 

onto another 

angle

If you’re really 

that fantastically 

awful at reading 

body language, 

you’re probably 

not great in bed 

anyway

The American duo’s latest release marks a subtle resurgence

