The New Yorker:

The viral resurgence of the single “Home,” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, reflects a simultaneous disgust at and attraction to an era of unabashed sincerity.

By Kyle Chayka

In the summer of 2009, a shambolic Los Angeles band called Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros released a single titled “Home.” A romantic duet between the group’s founder and lead singer, Alex Ebert, and his bandmate and sometime girlfriend, Jade Castrinos, it sounded like a parody of a folk standard, with whistling, jangling tambourine, and lyrics such as “Well, holy moly, me oh my / You’re the apple of my eye.” The song climbed Billboard’s U.S. alternative charts, but, more important, it left a mark on the American psyche, turning the band into one of those one-hit wonders that stands in for the vibe of an entire era. If you were living in Brooklyn during that time, in the cranking furnace of the faux-lumberjack, mustachioed, Mason-jar-clutching, acoustic-guitar-strumming hipster Zeitgeist, the Magnetic Zeros were ubiquitous. By 2011, the track had been used in commercials for the N.F.L., Microsoft, and Levi’s. Even Pitchfork, which gave the album on which the single appeared a score of 4.1 out of 10, allowed that “Home” was worthy of attention. As the economic casualties of the 2008 financial crisis reverberated, the song captured an accessible vision of American domesticity. It made you want to bail on the impossible job search and start a commune somewhere.

“Home” represented a mode of earnest self-expression that was utterly of its time; there was no irony or self-awareness behind the band’s D.I.Y., travelling-circus vibe. Ebert styled his hair like a cult leader’s, with a bushy beard below and a braided-mullet situation on top, and he took to wearing an unbuttoned white blazer over his bare chest. Castrinos’s voice was twee and naïf, the aural equivalent of a bob haircut and a polka-dot skirt worn to a Williamsburg dive bar. From the vantage of today, when the cultural lingua franca leans toward an incoherent, chronically online nihilism, it all appears rather alien—which is why a clip from the band’s 2009 performance for NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series has been electrifying the internet over the past week. The footage surfaced when the children’s-book author Justin Boldaji shared it in response to a (now deleted) prompt on X requesting the “worst songs ever”; Boldaji included the decisive caption “Worst song ever made.” The post is now nearing a hundred million views and inspiring paroxysms of millennial self-reckoning. Hailing from a time before the relentless onslaught of social media, Trumpian politics, covid, and artificial intelligence, the Magnetic Zeros’ prelapsarian sincerity now appears disastrously blithe. For better or worse, the band members didn’t know what was coming; they possessed an almost jealousy-inspiring innocence.

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