Here's a story for the kids

Subjects discussed: Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes, "cringe," 2010, other people's sex lives

The other day, on Twitter, people (“people,” you know who I mean, the disorganized blob of posting addicts, ahistorical teenagers, and semi-employed journalists and academics who on the right day constitute a plurality of social media discourse) were submitting bids for the worst song of all-time. And it wasn’t long before someone posted a clip of Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes performing their 2010 hit “Home” on NPR’s Tiny Desk.

(Twitter embeds don’t work anymore, but it’s around the 5:00 mark below.)

The clip went viral in a way that other suggestions for WOAT did not, even though “Home” isn’t that bad. Really, it’s not. Sentimental and cloying, yes, and the whistle is grating; I did not like the song when it came out, and no false nostalgia descends upon me now. But if I put on my “neutral cultural critic” monocle, strip away all associated memories, and attempt to hear it for what it is, “Home” is basically cut-rate folk-rock. Maudlin, but not ontologically objectionable. Tinker with the production and you can imagine the Carter Family singing it. There are worse songs in this genre, for sure, and way worse songs beyond that.

Falling in Reverse’s “Watch the World Burn”—that’s a truly vile song.

Tom MacDonald’s “Facts” featuring Ben Shapiro—just terrible.

And that’s not getting into the hundreds of god-awful filler tracks, novelty cash-ins, and self-recorded demos that litter the deepest recesses of Spotify’s library and Instagram Reels, though I grant that when people say “worst song of all-time” they usually refer to “worst song of all-time that listeners have heard of.”

But what made people (again, “people”) respond so strongly to “Home” was the video, in which singers Alex Ebert and Jade Castrinos duet face-to-face in that stripped-down and “real” Tiny Desk way. They make affectionate eye contact, and in particular Castrinos is making a face that says “I am sort of kooky but I really love you,” while Ebert’s face says “I am communicating a secret that only we know, which is that I really love you” A love song sung by two people who are in love—this is a formula that listeners usually fall for, and “Home” was sort of popular when it came out. It’s easily the band’s most popular song.

Still, much of what I just described is considered ontologically objectionable in 2025. Partly it’s because of the way they look: Ebert is long-haired, bearded, and shirtless underneath a white suit jacket (Father John Misty as a cult leader), while Castrinos hides very short hair beneath a knitted beanie, and lolls her head around as she sings. I cannot speak to the spiritually liberating experience of performing this song, but a ruder interpretation is that she looks like she’s clearly on drugs, thereby making her behavior insincere. Partly it’s the received understanding that this song is emblematic of the widely mocked “stomp clamp” genre that symbolizes millennial culture of the early ‘10s—music regarded as unilaterally embarrassing because the young have come for the old even though lots of us also hated it at the time!!!!!!! We didn’t all work for BuzzFeed!!!!!!!

Anyway. That “Home” seems “cringe” is possibly its worst sin—get a load of these two 20-something white people drawling at each other about moats and boats and waterfalls when they should be taking a dang shower. Actually, Ebert and Castrinos resemble the type of people who Father John Misty is so good at skewering, the self-serious flower child artiste types who are horrible to talk to at parties.

(A pet peeve: Everything is “cringe” from the right perspective. Even the haughtiest people I know have made—or enjoyed—art filled with emotions and ideas that are, to me, flatly wack. One of the most judgmental snobs I ever knew is now a fitness influencer. Another paints the worst paintings I’ve ever seen in my life. Another writes fiction. Calling something “cringe” is usually a confession of vulnerability, a sign of weakness. Projecting your own aesthetic and emotional insecurities onto other people? That’s cringe, bro.)

Watching all this discourse unfold about a song I never liked inspired a familiar feeling: the need to correct someone on the internet who is wrong. I particularly feel this feeling when the discussion involves a period of time I lived through, and still remember pretty well. It’s obnoxious to be confronted with the crude stereotypes of how people allegedly behaved and thought back then. I understand that history is always being re-remembered by the pedantic, but sometimes you go, “whoa, that’s my history.”

When “Home” came out I was 21 years old, and in college, and listening to plenty of folksy indie rock, which would theoretically make me the prime demographic except I just disliked this stuff. Whimsical theater kid music that wasn’t worth thinking about, or getting upset about. (Vampire Weekend—there’s a band I used to get upset about, before eventually changing my tune.) “Home” was for “hipsters” inasmuch that in 2010, you were halfway considered a hipster if you were under the age of 25, or you lived in a city, or voted for Barack Obama, or had ever used the internet to download a song. But mostly it was just a song, and not even that popular; B.o.B.’s “Airplanes,” which is just as bad or possibly worse, was played way more in 2010.

Really, my strongest instinct was to reject every single hypothesis about the song that people—even the smart ones—came up with. “Home” was not a byproduct of neoliberal scarcity; it did not mimic Obama-era optimism; it was not earnest in a way that conspicuously contrasts with today’s non-earnest music. The lyrics are slyly ironic, maybe, in that it can (emphasis on can) be read as spoofing the “aw shucks” indie meet-cute thing of this era. (Juno, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, 500 Days of Summer, etc.)

But this wasn’t some “Born in the USA” irony, where there’s a real tension between the music and the lyrics. “Home” is pretty easy to take literally, and at some point the whole irony/earnestness “are we or are we not doing this” thing becomes irrelevant. For example: LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge” is a playful and jokey song about anticipating your own cultural irrelevance, except James Murphy really was anticipating his own cultural irrelevance and all its lyrics state that directly. So maybe Ebert and Castrinos did sincerely believe in this lovey-dovey bullshit, even as they were disguising it with winky paeans to the homestead and “maw and paw.”

Honestly, though, there is just very little that can be deduced about the year 2010, or music, or white people, by solely focusing on “Home.” This is what I come back to: “Her?” Vikram Murthi put it best: There’s not much meat in that gym mat.

At the same time, it’s human nature to discuss. To speculate. This all happened on Twitter, the professional “opinion having” place, and lately I’ve been feeling especially cognizant of how many opinions I do not have. Discussions take place and my reaction is “okay.” It’s not that I’m not interested in what’s going on—it’s all I’m interested in—but I’ve developed a skepticism of this insistent, explanatory tone that is basically all over the text-based internet. (Definitely Substack, where you are reading this now.) This tone that says “here is the truth, and I’m going to tell you.” It is so confident, so convincing—and so often very wrong, or at least off-base.

It’s not just people being bored online—you ever listen to any random group of guys talk about anything at all? Online is just where we see it recorded for posterity. (Also, podcasts.) It’s appealing to rearrange the past, and debate the present, and resolve incoherent phenomena into a convenient framework. It makes life understandable; it feeds the lie that you yourself are an especially accurate observer of human behavior and world events—two things that, if true, make it easier to remain alive. I want to feel like I have a grip on things, that I alone can discern complex happenings, though history tells me this is not true. The number of things I have been wrong about in my life should disqualify me as an authority on many subjects, even those as frivolous as “Home.”

I’m not advocating for no analysis—just analysis that is maybe more honest about its biases, and point of origin. I am tired of the pose, the myth of the authoritative people-knower. I don’t want to live in a world created by self-anointed experts. And I guess seeing so many people base their theories about the 21st century on Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes’s “Home” sort of got to me, though not in any serious or soul-rending way. It was more like a pimple that I shouldn’t scratch, and scratch anyway.

It’s funny that the song is seen as “cringe” now, though, because my first thought watching the clip is that these two people—both thin, and attractive in the face—are obviously having sex with each other. Perhaps today they look like back-to-the-land types, or MAHA believers, or simply homeless—but back then, this look said “we are going to take drugs and fuck,” which is categorically not cringe. (Unless you’re talking too much about your polycule, but I don’t want to open that can of worms.) Sex can be gross and shameful, but two hot people giving in to unbridled desire is one of the most powerful forces alive. It’s why people watch movies, or pornography, and it’s why many were—and are—skeptical of the hipster, this fear that attractive people were fucking. And when you remember, as I said above, that “hipster” was at some point applied to literally everyone under the age of 25 who voted for Barack Obama, it all reduces to a fear that young people are having fun.

Ebert is a particularly funny vector for this accusation of “cringe” because he was formerly the lead singer of Ima Robot (nobody remembers this), a sexed-up dance-punk band from the early ‘00s that the art kids of my high school were obsessed with. The line “No, I want to wait for someone like you” from Ima Robot’s single “Dynomite” is as earnest as anything in “Home,” and it’s sung by the same person: a handsome white man who was probably having a lot of sex with other good-looking people. That the same guy with a different haircut could go from making cocaine music to marijuana music (to paraphrase an old Chuck Klosterman observation) is the stronger criticism about the meaninglessness of this stuff: It was all lifestyle content sold by intellectually bankrupt sex addicts.

Yet it’s easy to imagine Ebert coming by all of this authentically, in that girls and boys alike just want to have fun. This is uncomfortable to think about, the possibility that strangers may just be enjoying their lives. I watch a lot of TikTok videos, which I’m still unpacking, and a frequently encountered affect in the comments is a sort of smug tut-tutting. Like if you’re watching a video where a cat eats a slice of turkey, you’d better believe you’ll read a comment where someone tells a whole sob story about how you’d better make sure the turkey isn’t cooked in any herbs because my sister’s cat ate a piece of rosemary and died. If there’s any opportunity to judge from a removed vantage point, a commenter will take it. More and more I wonder if culture isn’t just cresting toward the inevitable endpoint of art not mattering so much as whether it is produced by someone worth rooting for—someone who doesn’t make other people regret their own personal choices. We’re already there, maybe.

I regret very few things in my life, and I am lucky to feel this way. But I’m certainly aware of the choices I didn’t make. And the truth is, in 2010 I was definitely envious of people like Ebert and Castrinos, so confident and happy in their crunchy earthy hedonistic bubble. I lacked the confidence to be so romantically available, in a way that might allow me to have my own full eye contact love affair with a sprightly and interested person. I was the type to pine, and ruminate, and this is not pining or ruminating music—this is stuff for dropping acid and frolicking in a field. My father had died a few years before, and I’d moved past the immediate shock toward a deeper understanding that I was now different, and sadder, in a way that often prevented me from letting loose. But really, my father’s death only sharpened and clarified feelings that were going to come out at some point. People my age who enjoyed this song—I don’t even think I felt like we were part of the same species.

This is why the clip of “Home” offends, I think, because it’s visual evidence that two young people were maybe in love. Without the video, it sort of sounds like Paul Simon. With the video, it’s everything you’re not, and everything you never were, and everything you will never be, which is a scary thought.

Of course, as someone who is now in love, and has been in love, I can correctly appraise that the song is worse than “Rude” and better than “All About That Bass.” But when I watch that NPR clip, I just see two people who were actually living their lives, which makes me feel nothing, because it happened to someone else.

Book stuff // other writing

See Friendship has been out for five months this week. Thank you to everyone who has read it. It’s on sale as an Amazon eBook for $1.99 for the month of August, and while I have feelings about the entire Amazon enterprise I am giving you personal permission to take advantage of this deal.

Also, I’ll be in Chicago for two upcoming readings: August 22 at Pilsen Community Books and August 23 at Evanston’s Bookends & Beginnings.

Here are two pieces of writing I recently published in The Atlantic:

On being a guy who loves his wife. (Cringe, I know.)

And the real reason why men should read fiction.

Thank you, and until next time.