MGMT Criticized For 'Kids' Music Video

The latest video for rock group MGMT features a toddler being terrorized by all sorts of monsters. The clip has generated some buzz on the Internet with its casting of a young boy looking truly scared throughout most of the video.

The video for the song "Kids" was released Thursday, though the song is on their album "Oracular Spectacular" issued in 2007. The band states the song was one of the first written back in 2003.

The video begins with a quote attributed to Mark Twain: "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster ... and if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss, gazes also into you." (Though the line was written by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.) The video then moves a nightmare narrative of a the young boy in a crib being grabbed at by monsters and aliens.

The child is picked up by a pop star-looking mother (who also happens to be the boy's real-life mom and folk singer Joanna Newsom) and taken for a walk, where they encounter more monsters and zombies. In another scene the boy enters the forest to find the band, dressed in silver, playing the song. The video continues with psychedelic images of children's programs, puppet shows and an animated sequence. The final scene of the video circles back to the opening quote with an animated abyss.

Throughout much of the video, clocking in at over six minutes, the boy looks frightened and crying. The band's Web site states that "No children were harmed in making of this video."

In Entertainment Weekly's review of the video, the boy is described as "the poor, helpless, sure-to-be-traumatized-for-the-rest-of-his-life toddler." And "Either that kid's tears were real, or we have the year's first serious contender for Best Performance by a Baby in a Music Video."

Another reviewer on HitFix writes about the casting of the boy in the video: "I'm sure some of this is blue screen in the opening, but when the little kid is crying as he runs past the monsters on the street, I wanted to call Child Protective Services."

New York magazine adds "If you thought that the kids who participated in those bizarre Anne Geddes photo shoots looked traumatized, just wait until you see this youngster's ruddy and teary mug."

You can make your own decision.