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“Whatever any rock star tells you, they are all conscious of the cult of personality,” said Alex Ebert, sitting up looking like a senior musicology professor in his nude button-down shirt, shaggy beard, and horn-rimmed glasses. between grand pianos and organs. “For many, it is their primary occupation.”
Mr. Ebert, 43, would know. In 2009, Los Angeles folk-rock band Edward Sharpe and founder of Magnetic Zeros led a 12-member neo-hippie bard group to rock n’ roll satori with the seismic single. “House.”
Maybe you’ve heard of the enthusiastic chorus, “Home is wherever I am with you!” Or maybe you remember the nearly revived chorus hook, “Laugh until you think we’re going to die barefoot on a summer night, it could never be cuter with you” tuned to accordions, trumpets, and Seven Dwarfs-style whistles.
The group grew overnight, late night talk show circuit and leading giant singalongs at festivals, for fans with real flowers in their hair. “Home” became a hit so fast that it even appeared in commercials, including one. NFL.
The group released four studio albums and toured for ten years. But that wasn’t enough for Mr. Ebert.
“A few years ago, I knew inside that I was dying,” he said in a video conference call from his New Orleans recording studio. “I told the band that I had to quit the tour. I just had to leave some space to jump in. ”
He felt that he could no longer do it. “Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, out,” he said. “How many times can you do that? How many times do I have to force myself to rhyme head to bed?”
And now the pop star has really taken a step forward. Ten years after his groundbreaking musical success, he is targeting an unexpected second act: the public intellectual.
“Does avoiding death kill life on earth?”
Ebert, who takes private lessons in theoretical astrophysics from a former Massachusetts Institute of Technology instructor for fun, produces a Brain Substack newsletter, Evil Guru. It’s investigating, so, um, how to define it?
Asked for an elevator speech as the focal point of the newsletter, Descartes launched a minute-long commentary on the “commodification of the spiritual” and the “religion of the self” controlling the names of Norman Vincent Peale, Galileo, and Kellyanne Conway.
Generally speaking, Bad Guru is a mix of philosophy and cultural analysis, with a sprinkling of self-help. Reading like a series of manifestos from a highly caffeinated cultural omnivore, the newsletter targets Silicon Valley’s self-empowerment mantras, profit-making turns to Eastern religion by wellness gurus, and sugar-high promises by truth-denying politicians.
“It is to escape death. kill life on earth” asked last June in an essay called “Dance of a Void.” Expanding on the idea of humans-as-a-cancer on the known planet, how did cancer cells prevent programmed cell death (apoptosis) and thus, how to manipulate the host, like humans trying to deny death by spending trillions? Plastic surgery, healthcare products, and private space rockets, all costing the Earth, “What a colossal irony it would be if avoiding our mortality was the greatest threat to our collective survival,” he wrote.
Bad Guru, though not bold in his views, shies away from the extreme partisanship and smug vitriol seen on Twitter, offering Mr. Ebert’s distant view of human stupidity, like a scientist staring at a Petri dish.
He admits that he has his own philosophical contradictions to deal with. “My ideology is more anarcho-communist than anything else,” he said of his political leanings. “But I’m also sitting here eating Whole Foods popcorn.”
Mr. Ebert owns a charming Victorian house in the Bywater district of New Orleans. In 2014, it acquired Piety Street Recording Studio, a studio in an abandoned post office next door where U2 and Arcade Fire were recording. $750,000.
“New Orleans feels a bit removed from the capitalist hustle and bustle,” said Mr. Ebert, who moved to the city from his hometown of Los Angeles in 2012. types of meaning in life.”
Unlike some Substack writers who turn their self-published letters into an article. source of subscription revenue, Mr. Ebert is not charging Bad Guru, saying he is “pretty much ready” financially for his music. “Otherwise people would say, ‘Is this rich musician going to get $10 a month from me?’ It will be like,” he said.
Mr. Ebert draws inspiration from other newsletters that blend culture, technology and philosophy. Astral Codex Tenby psychiatrist Scott Alexander popular but controversial Silicon Valley blog Slate Star Codex and stoaby the author and podcaster Peter Limberga devotee of Stoic thought.
His audience includes those who seek meaning beyond health industry stereotypes, armchair philosophers, Big Tech skeptics, and New Age types. Attracted by others Instagrampublishes dizzying photo carousels on topics such as “the story of the spiritualization of capitalism” here. And he admitted that some of them are Edward Sharpe fans, “bearing me for now and waiting for more music”.
“We’re in a time where what some call ‘meaning-making’ has become a full, obscure undertaking,” said author Daniel Pinchbeck, who is a fan of Bad Guru. “We need more people like Alex who use their voices and minds to define a level of coherence beyond the current dilemmas of left and right, spiritual or atheist.”
A year later, the Bad Guru audience is still small but growing; The most popular articles attract around 5,000 views on Substack.
But it’s still not about profit. Mr. Ebert had been writing for years—the title “Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros” was taken from an unfinished novel he wrote in his early 20s (“magnetic zeros” was a phrase from a mathematical theory he had devised). The 2020 quarantine has finally given him the opportunity to cut back on the music industry’s distractions and focus on ideas without squeezing ideas into lyrics and finding something dizzying. stage concept this will work on Colbert.
“I’ve never felt more alive than I do now,” she said. “For years, I kept all my intellectual pursuits secret. Without the showcase of the melody or the flash and the spectacle, I was afraid to let my ideas speak.”
“Complements themselves are death.”
His intellectual leanings got him in awkward spots. For example, in 2014 Robert Redford won a Golden Globe for best original score for the movie sailboat. “Everything is lost” After the ceremony he found himself chatting with Mr. Redford and Bono. This guy” refers to Mr. Ebert’s haunting backup soundtrack.
“I immediately start this theory about the intervening space in poetry, the negation between objects, and Eisenstein’s theory of montage,” he said. “They just looked at me. I realized I didn’t understand the silence.”
His obsessions are themselves obsessions, to the point where he asks his sister, Gaby Ebert, who is a psychotherapist recently, if he could be diagnosed with narcissism or another illness.
“If anyone on the planet is going to shoot at me – in a brotherly way – it’s him,” he said. But to my surprise, she said, ‘No Alex, you’re just different’. You open up by starting over.”
That doesn’t mean he quit music. Mr. Ebert released a solo album called “I vs I” in 2020 and he has two more on it. And he’s proud of his band’s legacy.
“People marry ‘Home’,” he said. “It became the music of people’s lives. Every time someone comes up to me on the street, their clear expression is ‘thank you’. It’s nice to think that I’m contributing to making life more magical for people.”
But Mr. Ebert never wanted that moment to last. It doesn’t do anything. Nothing should happen. “It wasn’t really fun after Magnetic Zeros was complete, because it died,” he said. “Complements themselves are death.”
Ebert, who killed that person, has little interest in creating a new character.
“If the Evil Guru thing accidentally ends up in some kind of personality cult,” he said, “I’ll burn him too.”
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