Cynicism & Sincerity: An Interview With Jreg

Jreg is a standout artist of our generation, creating multimedia performances with cynical humour to address political and social issues seldom discussed in mainstream art.

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Greg “Jreg” Guevara is a Canadian performance artist, musician, and YouTuber. He is known for political satire, anti-centrism, post and meta irony, discussing mental illness, community promotion, and running for Mayor of Ottawa.

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Originally from Ottawa, Jreg recently moved to Toronto and has already created a community of local YouTubers called the Canadian Cybernetics Cultural Research Unit (CCCRU). Out of his studio, he runs the Horseshoe Theory podcast with YouTuber ArtChad, where they invite Internet celebrities to discuss radical politics and culture.

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In the summer of 2024, he released his debut album, “Postmodern Love Songs”, co-created with musician Liam Schwisberg. The 17-track album cleverly combines musical genres with insightful lyrics to create relatable, humorous, and thought provoking songs that deconstruct our preconceptions of romance. The album delves into topics such as climate change, Internet celebrity, AI, atomization, the Black Pill and their impacts on relationships, mental health, and community. The album has the listener questioning what it means to love in our postmodern world.

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Listen to the album here:

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On January 16, 2025, I interviewed Jreg about his recent music, spoken word poetry, being a Toronto artist, and the importance of community for Gen Z.

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Image from @greg.guevara on Instagram

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You recently released your first album Postmodern Love Songs: What was your process to create this album and what inspired you?

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I’ve written songs forever and eventually had a lot of songs about love, romance, or relationships. I’ve been meaning to try different mediums, [but] I’ve never made an album before.

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A guy [Liam] that I knew from my university is a great music producer. I went to one of his shows and I cornered him afterwards, and I said “we should make an album together”. I forced him to pick a time and a place and then I went over. I don’t know if he was just being polite, but at a certain point he was locked in to making an album with me.

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In terms of inspiration, I don’t think love songs are very good. I don’t think they’re relatable. I don’t think they talk about things that we should talk about or they don’t put the emphasis on certain aspects of love that we like to forget about. Doing that in a way that feels authentic to me was important. There's very few love songs that I feel like I relate to, cause I have a lot of cynicism and irony around romantic-core. I was trying to capture that. I think there are a few good love songs out there, specifically there’s an album called “69 Love Songs” by the Magnetic Fields. They have a lot of good songs that I’ve been enjoying about love, about the feeling of songs being meaningless or not wanting to get over someone. Those are all very relatable for me. I just wanted to make some relatable content for the people.

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Your album is a concept album or a one-person musical. Could you explain what it’s about and the narrative structure?

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[The album] goes through a narrative of being attached to a girl, then being avoidant towards multiple women, then being fearful and descending into your schizoid cavern, having an AI girlfriend, and a girl of your dreams who just exists in your head. And finally, it ends on “I’d love to hear about your day and sing you romantic love songs and just be unironically in love with you”.

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[The album is] split into 4 parts. Each part represents a different part of attachment style. Attachment theory is this theory that you’ve got avoidant people and you’ve got anxious attached people. Then it’s expanded outwards, so there’s secure people and fearful people. In the first part [of the album] the character that I’m playing is [anxious attached and is] totally attached to one woman, obsessive with her, and needs her to survive! The second part’s flipped. He’s avoidant now. He doesn’t care about anyone or anything. [In] the third part he’s fearful, which means he wants to have relationships, but he can’t, [because] he’s too afraid. That manifests in something like avoidant personality disorder. The final part is secure. It seems to end on a good note but it’s really the character dreaming about what it would be like if he was secure.

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It ends [with the idea that] “this is the sort of love song I would sing to you if I was securely attached. If I had found the right person. But it’s not. It ends on a dour note. That’s what was authentic to me at the time of writing it, instead of trying to make it end on a good note. It’s [called] “Postmodern Love Songs”, so it is gonna be cynical and deconstructive and nihilistic.

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Was the album title something you knew going into it or did it come through the process of creating it?

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The album originally was gonna be called “heart quotation marks” [“♥️”]. We decided that was a little too avant-garde for marketing purposes, so we called it Postmodern Love Songs: Ironic love songs, [or] something like that, was always gonna be the pitch. Deconstructive, cynical, nihilistic romance songs, basically. It isn’t just that, because there is a lot of sincerity to everything in there, it’s just wrapped around layers of irony. I think we settled on “Postmodern Love Songs” pretty quickly. The heart with the quotation marks ended up making it to the album art.

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When doing live performances of the album in the Spring, were there any fun moments or surprises?

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The live performances of the album were always very chaotic and fun. Neither [Liam or I] are choreographers, we just came up with certain beats we wanted to hit in terms of dancing, singing, and engagement with the audience. We never really knew exactly what we were gonna do beforehand. It was fun to create something with my good friend Liam and to perform it and meet people. I love the fans. I love the fans!

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On a different note, you started as a spoken word poet. How did you get into this and how does it shape the music you create today?

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I never thought “I’m gonna be a spoken word artist”. I never sat down and came to that conclusion. I was just reading poems and then people were like “you’re doing spoken word”, and then I was like “okay, that’s what I’m doing”. So I got involved in the spoken word scene in Ottawa.

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I would go to spoken word events and be like “yawn, when’s my turn?” There’s some excellent, S-tier quality spoken word but the vast majority of it’s not very good. I would say my stuff wasn’t even very good, truthfully. But, you can put a shitty beat over spoken word, call it “The Political Compass Rap”, get over 3 million views, and watch your YouTube career [take off]. So that’s what I did.

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I played with spoken word enough until the point where I [thought that] maybe I’m better off doing songs with producers. There’s a world where “Postmodern Love Songs” is all spoken word, but it wouldn’t be very good. It’s much better when I’m working with producers.

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I still write poems, and I still have certain spoken word things that I perform. But mostly, I’m more of a lyricist these days.

You’re now in Toronto, but you’re originally from Ottawa. What do you enjoy about being an artist in Toronto?

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I tried making it work in Ottawa. I couldn’t. Smelly, stinky Ottawa [is] bad. But Toronto has been great. That’s partially because I moved here with the express intent of starting a community . [I wanted to] build something together with my friends, which we have done. We have a big space here. We’ve been working together here for about a year and it’s been great. It is all local. But if I hadn’t centered a scene around myself, I’m not sure [what I’d be doing].

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I think there’s a lot more stuff happening in Toronto. After a year of building it out very intentionally, I’ve got more opportunities in terms of things to go to, and nights out, and people to meet than I have time for. I have the opposite problem now of having to say no to things, which I’m not good at… There’s just so many more people to meet and aspiring artists to bring into the studio and help nurture, mentor, and grow into bigger and better things.

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How did your Toronto studio happen and how does that group inspire you?

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A lot of YouTubers try to collab with other people, but they don’t know them at all. So, the collab can come off as stilted, kind of pointless, or it doesn’t work out. A good and natural collab just comes from hanging out a lot.

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I moved here because I had other YouTubers in the area that were ready to be my ride or dies. They were great people to know. If you’re by yourself trying to create community, it’s twice as difficult as opposed to when you have a person with you who [you know] is aligned in the same direction as you. Now you have twice as many people reaching out and building things. [Originally] we didn’t have money to buy a big studio, so we were working out of my friend's basement apartment. He gave up his space. We wouldn’t have been able to do this if he hadn’t made that sort of sacrifice. It’s a matter of knowing the right people to build something with.

How does being a part of this community affect your artwork?

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In a community, I think my favourite thing to do is find people who are talented in certain areas and bring them together. So if we have an animator by the studio, [as] I’m currently working on an animated version of “Postmodern Love Songs”, I’m like “hey, I’d love to pay you a couple hundred bucks to make a quick animatic for this song”. Eventually I will have all 17 [animatics] of [the songs and] I’ll release them as a long video, and shout out 17 different great animators. Those are things that emerge naturally when people come by the studio. I also like working with people in person or having them around me while they’re working. [This way], I can leer over their shoulder, instead of having to respond to emails with some person who has no reason to care about what I’m doing, cause they’re halfway across the world.

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You’ve kind of spoken to this a bit, but what are the differences between being an artist in Ottawa vs. Toronto?

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Being an artist in Ottawa — dying slowly, considering getting a do-nothing government job, fear, anger, [laughs], negative emotions. Being an artist in Toronto — boom, boom, boom, boom, party! [Laughs] I don’t know exactly how to describe it.

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I went to Carleton University for Journalism. I was a part of the Carleton Art Collective. I really tried my hardest to make something sustainable happen. I did not succeed. But I would say all those attempts probably wisened me up in terms of being able to do something like this in the future. I was looking to make a community. It's probably good to try and fail 3 to 4 times until the point where you think it’s hopeless and impossible and then eventually just keep bashing your head against the wall until either your skull cracks or the wall breaks. That’s always been my advice.

You talk a lot about the importance of community. Why is this so crucial for Gen Z?

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We’re on our damn phones too much and we don’t know how to connect with real people!

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I think we are a uniquely atomized generation. Loneliness is gonna give us dementia. The Internet is a tool capable of bringing people together, it’s also capable of ripping people apart. I would say 90% of what the Internet does is rip people apart, but there is a bit of that bringing people together aspect. If we use it consciously, then we can use it to create meaningful, fulfilling communities around common interests, jobs, and stuff like that. That can be good.

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You don’t need a body anymore. You don’t need to go outside. You can be a brain in a vat. The stock market will keep running. If you were just manipulating web pages as a brain in a vat, that’d be fine. You can do that. I mean, not right now, because we don’t have the brain in a vat technology, but you can go on Über Eats and never leave your house.

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I realized that my friend hadn’t left the house in 6 months during COVID. He just stayed, he didn’t even go for a walk. He was just [ordering Uber Eats]. He somehow managed to get EI [employment insurance] by working 3 jobs simultaneously and then getting laid off. So he was just chilling. I was a little jealous, but I can’t live like this. I invited him to come have lunch and he said [he was] too busy looking at his computer screen [and] talking to ChatGPT.

So what’s next on your musical journey?

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What’s next on “Jreg’s Jrusical Jrourney”? I don’t know. Probably gonna make more individual songs with Liam. That’s probably my next bet. More singles.

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You’ve been putting songs at the end of some of your videos. Will you continue that?

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Yeah, in terms of the best bang for our buck. Getting [Liam’s] stuff seen is a goal of mine. I’d like to make Liam independently successful. I’ll do more stuff interlinked with my videos in a catchy way, cause I know the video will get a lot of views, so then the song will get a lot of views, as opposed to doing something which is just pure art existing in a vacuum as we don’t know how to market or sell that.

Any live performances of yours coming up, especially in Toronto?

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We’re gonna do bi-monthly shows through our studio at the Horseshoe Tavern. One of those might be a “Postmodern Love Songs” performance of some sort, but we’re still figuring that out. Probably once the full music videos are done for “Postmodern Love Songs” we’ll do another performance in Toronto.

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Other than that, we normally just keep up with the podcast and the community stuff. I didn’t advertise the last show properly cause I didn’t want to make a video talking about it. I will probably sell all of the bi-monthly shows through Horseshoe Tavern when I get the chance.

Before we wrap up, is there anything else you would like to add about your music, or art, or anything in general?

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I think there’s too much art and we all need to go outside and touch concrete, cause we live in Toronto, so there’s not much grass out here. But touch the concrete, lick the concrete, taste the concrete. Oom, nature.