In 1971, the great rock critic Lester Bangs tried to imagine a time when the music of the recent past would seem alien. Projecting himself into the old age he would never reach, he pictured his future grandkids asking him about the music of the ’60s: “What’s all this shit about the Yardbirds?” It was a challenge to articulate the significance of a decade that had already hardened into a myth, as well as to reckon again with an original whose legions of imitators would go on to take over the world.
Lately, grizzled millennials have been pondering a similar question about our own recent past: what’s all this shit about Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros? A clip of the folk-rock band’s 2009 Tiny Desk Concert has become one of those pieces of internet backwash that periodically float to the top of one’s feed. One moment you are reading the news and seeing images of unspeakable human suffering, and then suddenly there they are again: two extremely unshowered people singing greeting-card lines at one another, flanked by a phalanx of their pals, who play ukuleles and hand percussion and occasionally join in with a hey!
Within the context of no context, the video could be an excerpt from a Portlandia sketch, or maybe part of a larger arsenal of weapons-grade cringe clips like the ones assembled by the Instagram account “catatonicyouths”: high-school metal bands opening up this pit in a Denny’s; white reggae acts pushing proto-MAHA woo-woo. In fact it is a performance of “Home,” a song that sold a million copies, back when we said such things about songs. To both those who lived through the Edward Sharpe moment and those who weren’t old enough to experience it, the clip is equally jarring and baffling, a dispatch from a forgotten world. Did people really like this, or was it just crammed down their throats by corporate radio? Was this cool? Was this earnest or a schtick? Is this what 2009 looked, sounded, and smelled like?
To answer these questions, we need to survey a broader field before working our way back to Edward Sharpe. 2009 is not remembered as an especially significant year in music. If anything, 2008 was the year of innovation, and 2009 saw its consolidation. Lest we forget, the number-one song of the year was “Boom Boom Pow” by the reactivated Black Eyed Peas. This song heralded the arrival of a new mode of futuristic, EDM-ified pop—a style into which Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” from the year before had placed a cautious toe, but whose mission statement would come from the Peas, one of the defining acts of the previous Top 40 regime. Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak, also released in 2008, had opened a new path forward for hip-hop, placing the heavily AutoTuned voice against a pointillistic backdrop of thumps and chirps. This was the self-involved, minimalist, bummer foil to the maximalist and impersonal Black Eyed Peas EDM-pop; it would be endlessly imitated, up until the 2010s, when it would merge with energies swirling around Atlanta trap music, reaching its most advanced expression in the anguished mumble flow of the appropriately named Future—and its most depressing expression in the slick self-pity of Drake.
It has been said that songs like “I Gotta Feeling” are “Obamacore”—that is, that they speak to a pervasive mood of Obama-era optimism, one that feels alien to us today. This is true enough: the first Black president, the mandate of hope and change, the promise of recovery from the financial crisis and winding down the forever wars. If any artist qualifies as Obamacore, it is surely will.i.am, who seemed unable to stop writing songs about the then-candidate (a tendency The Boondocks sent up in its parody song “Dick Riding Obama”). Still, it might be more accurate to say that this was the period when a spirit of futurism took over pop music. “I’m so three thousand and eight / You’re so two thousand and late,” Fergie crowed, before will.i.am came back in with that robotic hook, pulverizing words into fragments of senseless sound. Electric guitars and other holdovers from the first Max Martin era would soon all but disappear from the pop charts, replaced by wobbly synths and robotic voices; Katy Perry’s One of the Boys, from 2008, would prove to be the last blockbuster pop-rock album for a very long time. The Kanye shutter shades, the Bionicle mask Gaga wears in the “Poker Face” video, the Peas’ Tron cosplay in the “Boom Boom Pow” video: this was speculative pop from the techno-future, where the party never has to stop because our robotic limbs will take over for us when we grow too tired to dance.
Dancing—pop music has always been an incitement to move the body, but now sweaty bodies in motion would be the main subject. The confessional mode, from the Great American Songbook through “…Baby One More Time,” would live on, but over the next ten years or so the most popular relationship songs would increasingly be maudlin ballads, a separate form relatively isolated from the churn of pop trends: John Legend’s “All of Me,” latter-day Adele, Sam Smith’s Tom Petty ripoff, Ed Sheeran. There is a change in scale in pop music during this period, from the cramped space of the couple to the crush of limbs in motion at the club. It is a question for the galaxy-brained Fredric Jameson disciples among us how seriously to treat the appearance of the crowd, the multitude, as the new subject of pop music directly before the moment of Occupy Wall Street, and concurrently with the amazing “jobless recovery” that produced lumpen masses of the unemployed and the gigging precariat.
One available argument about the folk-rock music bubbling up around the same time is that it counterbalanced the loud futurism of the new Top 40 sound: giving the sensitive listener a therapeutic feeling of intimacy and groundedness, turning the clock back to a simpler time, shrinking the scale down from the club to the cabin. Or, to put the point in more concrete terms, this was introverted headphone music, not extroverted DJ music. This argument is plausible when talking about a record like, say, Bon Iver’s 2007 For Emma, Forever Ago, with its off-the grid mythos, though even there it misses that album’s foggy abstraction, the ungroundedness it expresses in its halo of reverb. It falls apart when you encounter anything by Edward Sharpe. The whole deal with Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros was that they were a band in the sense of “merry band of pranksters”; they were a loose and roving group that invited audiences to join in on their hijinks. “Ask anyone who’s held hands with a stranger or danced barefoot in the front row at an Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros gig,” Rolling Stone reported in 2009; “the 10-piece folk-rock ensemble’s shows are more like shamanistic tent revivals than rock concerts.” This was indie rock’s version of EDM pop’s communal, ecstatic impulse.
In this way, the Magnetic Zeros represented one endpoint of a tendency, within indie rock, toward theatricality, fiction, worldmaking. Their immediate forebears were not so much the likes of Bon Iver—then a solitary figure hunched over his guitar; eventually a solitary figure crooning into a vocoder—but The Arcade Fire, with their similarly sprawling lineup, and Animal Collective, with their goofy alter egos. In their dense and cinematic music, and in their spectacle-heavy live performances, these bands created social worlds that felt self-contained, sealed off from the chatter outside. EDM pop was the music of the crowd or mass; this strand of indie rock was the music of the cult or the extended family. Animal Collective’s epochal song “My Girls” came out in 2009—another post–subprime-mortgage-crisis anthem about home, specifically about wanting a “proper house” for your wife and kids. The next year, The Arcade Fire would release an album, called The Suburbs, about, among other things, the suburbs.
Into this space stepped Alex Ebert, frontman of the very aughts dance-rock band Ima Robot. Worn out from the disappointments of small-time rock and roll, he got mostly clean, sort of wrote part of a novel, and started a romantic relationship and creative collaboration with singer Jade Castrinos. Over the course of “five years on mushrooms,” Ebert stopped shaving, grew out his hair, and started carrying himself like a hippie shaman. The eventual result of this transformation was the album Up from Below by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, a band Ebert and Castrinos put together, loosely themed around a messiah character from Ebert’s unfinished novel. The music on this record is mostly faux-psychedelic roots-rock soup, played with the naïve touch of nonmusicians or barely-musicians. The general retro tint to the production does not elevate or redeem the songs’ essential quality of pastiche: a charmless Belle and Sebastian rip here; a groove cribbed from the Zombies there. From the vantage of 2025, a lot of it sounds surprisingly like the mocktail-lounge rock of Khruangbin. What does stand out is the constant stream of apparent backing-vocal ad-libs—whoops and yelps, laughter, bits of studio chatter. It is this peripheral hum of social life, more so than the content of the songs themselves, that gives the songs “the feeling of a big ‘love-in,’” in the words of a Schmoop study guide on the band that exists for some reason.
None of the songs on Up from Below conveys this communal feeling more than “Home.” The group whistling, the swelling horns, the shouted gang vocals: all these features of the arrangement allow the song to toggle between the one-on-one scale of the very nonfictional love duet at its center and the wider scope of an imagined love-in. It feels somehow both private and participatory. Or rather, it choreographs your participation—one gets the sense that the imagined audience is already shouting along on the recording itself.
Then the imitators arrived, both to the pop charts and to the broader world of soundtracks and background music. The Lumineers soon came out with their own stripped-down version of the Edward Sharpe sound, dialing up the ho and the hey and introducing benignly competent singing. Of Monsters and Men delivered an uncannily polished “Home”-alike with 2011’s “Little Talks.” Mumford and Sons were on a parallel track; they innovated by introducing har to the lexicon of shout-along phrases. Ebert complained in a recent interview about all the store-brand versions of “Home” on TV commercials—though the genuine article has been featured in its share of ads, too.
With its relentless positivity and rustic affectations, this music has unsurprisingly become associated, in retrospect, with cringe millennial consumption culture. It is the music of sanitized, late-corporate-hipster taste: vests and trilbies, artisanal pickles, epicsauce burgers you order from a chalkboard. But it soon lost even that bit of residual crunch and just became something even more generic—“pure, distilled H&M black friday 2012 commercial music,” in the words of one YouTube comment on a recent parody of this style (chorus: “No one I know will ever die!”). Here we can return to the original question, in a more pointed form. Are these twee shoutalongs so cringe today because they remind us of this era’s misplaced optimism—in particular the conflicted self-image of the so-called “creative class” in the age of Silicon Valley’s swaggering ascendence, assuaging its bad conscience about its role in the capture and commodification of social life with bouts of ethical, pseudo-environmentalist consumption?
Yes, and. Recession-era folk rock is about the capture of social life. The form’s ability to take the fragments of chatter and moments of communal participation that accompany music and absorb them into the music itself—the shouts and claps functioning as built-in crowd noise—is its distinguishing feature. It is exactly this feature that makes it uniquely attuned to the changing social function of music. Wesley Schultz, singer for the Lumineers, told an interviewer about the genesis of “Ho Hey”: “That song was an effort to get under people’s skin at shows in Brooklyn, where everyone is pretty indifferent…. And I figured if we could punctuate it with shouts we might get someone’s attention.” On one level, the struggle for an audience’s attention is an age-old problem. But on another, the Lumineers were feeling the leading edge of a new version of this struggle, one ushered in by the rise of the streaming regime. Spotify launched in the U.S in 2011, the year before “Ho Hey” was released. Soon streaming revenue would surpass the revenue from album sales, while many artists saw a significant drop in their cut of the money. In fact, it was Spotify that gave the post-Sharpe genre the first name that really stuck: “stomp and holler.” The term started circulating around 2017, when users were confused to find it in their year-end “wrapped” reports. Apparently the “stomp and holler” tag originated from the streaming platform’s “machine listening” program, which uses algorithms to analyze and sort music.
Over the next decade after “Ho Hey,” the entrenchment of the streaming regime would drastically change the way music was valued. “Often,” Liz Pelly writes in her 2025 book Mood Machine, “conversations about the streaming era center the way music has been financially devalued, but there is also a broader, harder-to-pin-down cultural devaluation that comes with streaming: the relegation of music to something passable, just filling the air to drown out the office worker’s inner thoughts as spreadsheets get finalized and emails get circled [back] on.” The tragedy of stomp and holler—today more commonly called “stomp clap hey“—is that of a desperate attempt to elicit participation becoming just another ignorable feature of pleasant-enough music, smooth soundtrack fare for passive listening. Or put more cynically, within the streaming regime, all the stomps and claps and heys became ways to imbue lifeless music with a compensatory, faux-social character, the same way reverb drenched that period’s “bedroom pop” productions in an effort to make up for their insularity.
And yet in that clip of Ebert and Castrinos singing to each other, something different plays out. The chemistry between the two clearly transcends schtick. As Jeremy Gordon recently wrote, “it’s visual evidence that two young people were maybe in love.” This, he suggests, is “why the clip… offends. 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.” Another way of putting this point might be: there is a hard kernel of real life here that exceeds the music even as it animates it; it has not yet been absorbed and defused. Ebert and Castrinos share a secret you can never know, an understanding you can never enter into. The cringe many of us feel when watching them is not a sensation of discomfort at finding our music encumbered by stubborn contextual baggage. It is more of a melancholic feeling, a sense of impending loss of music’s social penumbra. “Things shine with their maximum brilliance,” the artist Ross Bleckner once wrote, “just at the point that they’re about to die.” All the reflected light is what makes us wince.