The Hammer Museum, July 23, 2009 -

The night began like most others in L.A.; we sat in traffic. My friend Krystof was trying to figure out why his iPhone didn’t sound right playing through my car speakers. I wasn’t paying too much attention – I was busy checking my work e-mail on my phone while driving and attempting to explain a lecture I’d been listening to during my morning commute on the nature of memory by some guy named John Steele (a random Pirate Bay download). Little did I know how prophetic it would turn out to be. From Wikipedia, “While his work is often closely related to the psychology of fragrance, in talks and writings Steele also explores Buddhism, Vedic culture, the great yugas, geomancy and geomantic amnesia, geobiology, time out of balance, shamanism, the effects of geological formations on human consciousness, cross state retention, and the importance of sacred sites and spaces.” That could easily be a review of the new Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros record.

Part of a fashionable non-movement of “Hippiesters”, Edward Sharpe is a collection of ex-hipsters who have seemingly become spiritually enlightened, which only time will prove or disprove. If you’ve ever attended Agape church in Los Angeles – and if you’re plugged in to celebrity culture at all you’ve heard of it – then you’ll know the vibe (by the way, the “church” is very much worth going to at least once – http://www.agapelive.com/). There are lots of people in hippy-like fashionable garb driving home in Mercedes, Bentleys and on custom Harleys.

The band is fronted by Alex Ebert, of Ima Robot, and consists of members of various L.A.-based bands. It also has a former American Apparel chick Jade Castrinos…but I haven’t been able to confirm any American Apparel photos, just that she worked for them and was a fixture of the LA hipster scene of the mid-2000’s. But why all this background for a show review? That’s part of the deal, are they for real or not? Perhaps the suspicion arises because of the fact that Alex Ebert used to wear eyeshadow, or the connection to major Hollywood stars, or the fact that there were about a hundred onlookers behind the stage all wearing extremely expensive clothes and not dancing. Whatever the case the music is fun, a lot of fun, and that’s probably why at the end of the day none of the “why” actually matters. And to see it relatively new, before the flood, was a treat.

I won’t speak about the opening band Eskimo Hunter, it isn’t fair to them. I wasn’t there to see a cross between My Bloody Valentine and whatever else they are supposed to be so after doing my best to get into them I spent the rest of their set checking out the strange mix of people that Edward Sharpe had brought out. There were raver kids, hipsters, hippies, bro’s, adults, film industry people and an unusually large amount of high-school kids, which might have something to do with the Alex Ebert/Ima Robot connection. The place was packed – people were everywhere – but because of our connection with Capt. AKAK we were able to get right up next to the stage.

Once the one-man sound crew began setting up for Edward Sharpe you could see how fucking cool this show was going to be – piano, tambourine, a xylophone, an accordion, a trumpet, synths, 2 guitars, bongos, drums and several vocal mics. After a long time – there was one guy setting up the microphones – the band came on stage, all twelve of them. They began the set with “Janglin’” a quasi sing-along that essentially defines the band – feet stomping rhythm, lyrics about spiritual redemption, and a lot of ass shaking.

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros are if nothing else a great party band. Everyone in the group is into the music and into the feeling that it elicits in the audience – you can’t help but have fun. Any cynicism or coolness you came to the show with quickly evaporates – if you don’t believe me by the end of the show I was on the stage after someone shouted “Can we get on the stage?” and Alex said “Yes, just don’t break anything.” And I don’t do those things.

But this gets back to the question – are these guys for real? Do they mean what they’re singing about and the vibe that they put off? There is the definite feeling of a spiritual movement, of proselytizing, of doing things differently. They’re like a traveling religious show. Alex Ebert wears all white, is barefoot, and holds hands with people in the crowd while he sings. His first words to the crowd were the cryptic, “I had a paleolithic egg around my heart, I’ve broke it off.” The members of the band look at you in the eye and smile, after the show everyone in the band comes out and hangs out with the audience. Krystof was able to talk with Jade (although he couldn’t bring himself to confess his feelings for her). It’s like everyone was a member of some new-age church and decided to start a band; there’s a distinct lack of guile. At the end of the show we saw the accordion player getting picked up by her Mom.

Ryan McGinley is a New York photographer and the guy who took the photo above, you probably know who he is. When asked about his pictures he said, “My photographs are a celebration of life, fun, and the beautiful. They are a world that doesn’t exist. A fantasy in which freedom is real. There are no rules. They are of the life I wish I was living.” Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros probably fall into that category. They’re a mixture of the real and not real, of a staged experience and the authentic, they evoke possibilities beyond our own inevitable ones. And for that they point to the world we all crave.

(editors note: we’ve been traveling for the last month, please pardon the gap between posts.)

It couldn’t have been made up. We came out of the Sierra Mountains after six days in the backcountry of California; didn’t see one other living soul for the entire time. It was just us, the animals, and scenery that looked like it came from an Ansel Adams photograph or Currier and Ives print. We were in heaven.

Stopped at an Arco station on the way out of the mountains to fill up for gas. Went inside to pay and on the way out saw the headlines: “Retirement Funds Drop 20%”, “Depression: Is It Coming?” and the like (since then markets have dropped by 40%). In the short time we had been gone the stock market had dropped to its lowest point in 5 years and wasn’t stopping, gold was fetching unprecedented prices and there was a palpable sense of fear in the air. People were giving each other furtive glances, looking for signs.

To have emerged from the wilderness after a week of no external stimulus save for the trees, wind, and mountains this was an awe inspiring moment. We had felt at home in the mountains. Our first inclination was to turn the car around and head back. Besides the fact that it is now snowing in the Sierras and freezing to death is not a constructive way to spend your winter months we had also eaten all of our freeze-dried food. So, romantic notions aside, we headed back into the maw of Southern California, wondering if our bank cards would be working the next time we stopped for coffee.

The long hours on the road lent themselves to contemplation. What if we entered another Great Depression? Would this be bad or good? Besides all the arguments that can be made that only a bourgeois faux-intellectual would be considering this question at all it still held merit. America prides itself on being a country of the middle-class. Even though that is not the reality, the gap between rich and poor is at an ever-increasing all-time high, that is the belief. The belief in what America is defines its people, helps them get up in the morning, and helps them keep spending money, even money they don’t have. They do this in the belief that the future will be better, because it always has been, hasn’t it?

History is an unimaginably powerful force. It’s the bedrock of ideology, another word for it might be propaganda. The public school system won’t admit to it but what we’re teaching our children, and what we were taught, is of course not what actually happened, but what we would like to have happened. One of those core beliefs is that we as Americans always move forward, always overcome, despite the obstacles placed in our way by antagonistic forces. We defeat powerful countries to win independence, we defeat native civilizations, we expand westward, we do the impossible, we bend nature to our will. The basic belief is that there is no problem too big for “us”, even though no one knows who that “us” really is. “It’s certainly not anyone I know,” someone said in a recent article, “Americans are all a bunch of lazy, commodity-purchasing dummies.”

But the public education system is not the only place that ideology is propagated. The tail-chasing media (media in the general sense of visual and written content) creates a whirlwind of information. In a social milieu of isolation (what America has become due to lack of non-commercial public space and a fixation on television and the internet) the electronic and print media have become the de-facto social meeting ground. And what are the ideas that those mediums communicate? One place to look is at how those two mediums became popularized. Television, even cable, is only truly sustained by advertising and the internet is now overwhelmingly commercialized (despite its somewhat idealistic beginnings). As tools of mass communication they are also tools of one repeated message: buy, buy now, buy more.

There are exceptions to every rule and the above have their share. However, the main point is this: ideology or belief in an idea is what people base their decisions on. Those ideas, despite whatever alternatives exist are for the majority of Americans, despite their class, dictated by education and the media. The beliefs that are being indoctrinated into us are twofold: 1. ours is an invincible nation 2. we are defined by what we own.

Those beliefs are destroying us, literally. While some might take umbrage at the shallowness that they’re being accused of or in turn deny that they believe those things at all I can only suggest the following: “Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?” Matthew 7:16. Meaning, “I don’t give a shit what you say you believe, what do you do and more importantly, what is the outcome?”

This culture is the outcome, this country as it stands today is the outcome. No longer a republic but simply a nation, our actions, despite our beliefs, have become more and more irresponsible, more and more unthinking, more and more automatic. The ties that bind us together have decayed, loosened, broke-free and been replaced by an unthinking-ethos of reaction. Emotion has replaced authenticity and cheap emotion at that.

Perhaps it’s the Southern California landscape that infects these observations. The home of McDonald’s, gridlock, mall culture, the freeway, drought, unchecked pollution, gated communities, destroyed ecosystems, elective plastic surgery, ostentatious displays of wealth next to unaddressed poverty, it’s all here waiting for you in fabulous Southern California.

And yet it’s more than that, this area is simply the bellwether of a larger cultural trend, one seen now in small towns throughout America. That trend is the death of America as a cherished ideal of self-government, of control over one’s own destiny, of the ability to stand up and say “No”. Granted, this is a death that has been reported prematurely over and over, in every decade, by virtually every social commentator, as a way of lamenting lost opportunities and lack of a shared culture. 

This time it’s different. The pockets of resistance have dried up. Everyone seemingly wants a piece of the pie from the artists to the intellectuals to the non-profits to the religions, everyone’s ready to sell-out, ready to do whatever it takes to get ahead and raise a little capital. To do what with exactly? Since when did money or material wealth get anyone into heaven?

Which brings us back to the mountains and our reentry into civilization from voluntary isolation in the wilderness, a wilderness that America still offers and if you listen right, can still speak to you. It’s the wilderness of the true, unspeakable, universal God that religions point to, of John Muir, and of countless generations that go all the way back to a savannah somewhere in Africa where we took our first steps as a people, those first awkward steps toward where we are today.

Coming out of that wilderness after days of seeing nothing but the non man-made, and listening to nothing but the wind and birds, and hearing nothing at night except the cries of coyotes, and realizing that a hundred miles into the backcountry late in the season if you trip and break a leg it means you die and then coming out of that and immediately seeing the headlines of the purely man-made, of the crisis, of the sky-is-falling rhetoric it shoves in your face the hidden truth: we’ve lost our independence, we’re manipulated, we’re helpless, we’re wards of the state and we had better get used to it. This country is no longer ours, is no longer here for every man’s benefit, the flame of the ideals it was founded on have been extinguished. It’s taken a hundred and forty-three years but they’ve finally been snuffed out.

Another depression? Bring it on. We the people deserve it, deserve to stand in breadlines, to not be able to afford gasoline, to have our houses and cars repossessed, to have our grandparents’ life savings wiped out, to not be able to afford the next worthless electronic gadget, to have to do something with our time besides watch television. Do you not get it yet? Do you not see how important an ideal is, how fragile it is, how important it is to keep it alive and well amongst a people, to keep it strong and robust, despite the fact that those people might choose to do something besides buy the next product, or try to get one up on their neighbor?

That ideal points toward eternity, it is spirit manifest on earth, the best and truest goal that anyone and any people can point their life towards. It is the eternal wisdom of thousands of years of human existence, of people throwing off the chains of control and authority and saying once and for all, “you don’t own us.” The post Civil War story of our country’s existence has been one of asking for those chains of control to be put back on, of practically begging to have the locks put in place and the guards watch us, all for the small crumbs of material wealth, a poor substitute for freedom.

Those chains are now in place and tight, the locks are fastened and closed, the keys safely in the pocket of the guards who are our own brothers and sisters. As we are led to the cells the last light of freedom is extinguished from behind the heavy steel doors. As they close we have a sudden, sad, final realization: we’ve done this to ourselves. For there is no conspiracy, no big brother, no one to blame but us. We voluntarily walked away from the light, from freedom, from responsibility, and asked to be shackled. What we never knew is this: once freedom is voluntarily given up, there is no regaining it.