Tough Customer // Wire

Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros

ESMZ

As a general rule, I hate hippies. They’re dirty, they have bad taste in music and they are often vegetarians. A hippie can talk for hours about the cosmic earth mother and the collective need for universal love without saying a single thing of substance. And god forbid you get a hippie talking about their hemp pants or their hand-blown glass bong. Not even a 2nd grader stuck inside on a rain day is that excited about arts and crafts.

To be fair, I should differentiate between the different kinds of hippies. The ones that I’m talking about - the ones I can’t stand - are the least genuine. They are the kind that come from upper class families in Southern California, who go to the University of Oregon where they subsequently stop bathing and develop an unhealthy affinity for jam bands. They are the kind of hippie that hangs out on Haight Street, asking me for spare change to buy some granola for their dog. They are the kind of hippie that preaches peace and love and then tries to cut me in line at the farmer’s market.

Any hippie falling into or near the above mentioned categories is fully deserving of all my derision. This is because they are all pathetic fakers; uncreative people who have borrowed an entire cultural movement wholesale because they are too lazy to start their own. And they picked the easiest one. To me this just says that you are not only lazy, but that you love armpit hair and the dirty crotch smell of patchouli.

That said, it’s hard for me to really hate on the original hippies. After all, they were rebelling against the square attitudes of the 50s, and they are largely responsible for a lot of the relaxed moral standards we enjoy today. And I can’t lie - the first time I took mushrooms and went to a Grateful Dead show it was pretty cool. Of course, I was 16 and just being out of the house and high on anything was pretty cool to me at the time. But still. I can at least see what the hippies from back in the day were getting out of it.

Fast forward to right now and you’ll find a group of hippies that I actually respect. These are not the skunky gutter punks hanging out in the park and they are not the hacky sack playing douche bags you find at Dave Mathews concerts. These are modern day freaks, stoned on life and happy to let their freak flag fly. It might be more astute to say that these are people who couldn’t be any other way. They are simply wildly creative non-conformists who grow their hair long and like to howl at the moon.

These so-called hippies have loosely cohered around the freak folk movement, but most of them are more freaky than folk. Brightblack Morning Light, Devendra Banhart - these are acts that appeal not just to groovy hippie chicks and aging surfers. They cast a much wider net because what they are doing is genuinely creative and 100% sincere. They can’t be anything else but themselves. I mean, have you ever heard Devendra Banhart talk? That guy couldn’t hold an office job if his life depended on it.

Another group that should be added to this good hippie honor roll is Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros. This rag tag posse of Los Angeles based troubadours has a care-free, yet highly musical vibe that rests somewhere between The Band and Arcade Fire. Their songs reel back and forth between camp fire sing-a-longs and full gospel revival. In between they get weird, they get funky and they get loose. It’s the kind of sound that makes me want to grow out my hair and jump on the free love express. It makes me want to share my wine and bang on a drum all day - which is probably exactly what Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros expect of their audience.

Well, I’m not going to stop showering or anything, but I can get down with that.

MP3: ‘40 Day Dream’