In the summer of 2009, my wife and I were visiting family on the east coast. The trip included a stopover in Manhattan, staying at my father’s three-story walk-up near the UN.
We’d been to a Yankees’ game, The Today Show, and David Letterman. But I really wanted to see a comedy show, and we were in luck. A legend was in town.
Paul Mooney walked on stage at Caroline’s on Broadway, wearing a black leather jacket and matching bandana. The basement comedy club was providing a few laughs on a Thursday night, and some welcome reprieve from the heat and humidity.
Mooney was looking old and ornery, but still ready to trash all comers. He took a seat on stage; a basic metal folding chair and a mic was all he needed. Mooney didn’t let up for 90 minutes.
“Oprah is fat again,” he started in on his first victim, the billionaire media mogul.
“Talking about her thyroid.”
“She was abused as a child.”
“That’s all you abused children do. EAT!”
“I got her a present.”
“It’s a talking refrigerator.”
“When she opens the door it yells, CHEW ON SOME ICE!!”
“SUCK ON A CARROT!!”
That’s how it went. One person after the next, rich and poor, black and white, talking trash, from Oprah to Obama.
It was kind of funny. But it was mostly mean and exhausting. You’d laugh and hope he didn’t turn his attention on you.
Oh, and every joke was closed out with the same phrase. “Keeping it f*cking real.”
“Keeping it f*cking real.”
As in, hey, don’t get mad, I’m just being honest. I’m just keeping it real.
We were all asked to repeat that phrase along with him. He’d tell a joke, give a brief pause, raise his hand to the audience, and we’d all say it with him.
“Keeping it f*cking real.”
I don’t know if Mooney was really keeping it real though. I can’t imagine him walking around the house in his slippers, berating celebrities, and politicians, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.
Keeping it real, keeping it really real, is one of the most useful skills you can develop. But saying terrible things, and then explaining it away as “keeping it real” seems like an excuse to be an ass hole.
Part of keeping it real is being honest with yourself and others.
Mark Twain said, “If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything,” and the same advice holds true for keeping it real.
Telling the truth, and living your truth, is something I think about a lot.
Being authentic.
It should be easy to be authentic. To be your true self.
Strangely enough though, authenticity can be a hard skill to cultivate.
Kids are authentic. At first.
They do crazy stuff like tell their friends, “My mom only spent $7 on your birthday present,” or they’ll ask (loudly) why the man at church has a “hole in his hair?”
For the uninitiated, a hole in your hair means you have a bald spot.
When you’re young, your authenticity and curiosity has not been covered by the masks of politeness and social norms. And it hasn’t faded behind the veil of image and false bravado.
Yet.
With that knowledge, you may look to reclaim your youthful authenticity and just start spouting off like Paul Mooney. No filter. But is that what authenticity is all about?
“It won’t do, man.”
Felix Dennis was an English publisher and entrepreneur. He founded Maxim magazine—among other publications—and ran with a pretty cool crowd.
But as a child, he wanted to make music. Like a lot of rich people who had a dream of making music, he wiggled his way into some musical inner circles, and he tells a great story about some feedback from John Lennon.
John [Lennon] signaled for Phil [Spector] to press the record button while I was singing, and Phil reluctantly complied. Eventually, John stopped our impromptu jam session and ushered me into the control room. Then he played back the tape, urging me to listen carefully. I sat and listened, nervous and embarrassed.
“Well?” he asked when it was over. “What do you hear?”
“At least I was in tune . . .” I began.
“No, no, no!” John said. “Your voice is fine. But what did you hear?”
“I heard a guy who wants to be an R&B singer,” I mumbled.
“Yeah. But what you heard was an English guy copying Howlin’ Wolfe and Chuck Berry’s voice. A pastiche—but it isn’t your voice. Now do one using your own voice.”
“I traipsed back into the studio and tried. What followed was a catastrophe: I had no voice of my own. I’d been singing R&B on stage since I was thirteen—I’d even earned a living doing it—but I had never developed my own voice. I’d always imitated the voice of the original artist. Late that night, sitting around his kitchen table scoffing sandwiches, John grinned over his plate and delivered some devastating advice: “It won’t do, man. It’s not that you can’t sing . . . sure you can do a fair imitation of Chuck Berry or whatever, but people don’t pay for imitations. You gotta find your own voice or stick to editing your magazines.”
“Mick Jagger does it,” I protested.
“Yeah, but Mick always sounds like Mick, no matter what he sings. You just sound like a copycat. Your voice changes with each song.”
– Felix Dennis, How to Get Rich
I’m sure that hurt, but Lennon was being a friend, he was keeping it real in his own way. He was telling Dennis to remove the mask, to be authentic.
But after all those years of imitation, authenticity was easier said than done.
And the tendency to imitate can creep in faster than you’d think.
America the Beautiful
In Born Standing Up, Steve Martin writes about performing “America the Beautiful” with his mother accompanying him on piano.
“What came out of my mouth was an eight-year-old boy’s attempt to imitate his dad’s deep baritone. I plunged my voice down as low as it could go. My mother, as much as she wanted to continue, collapsed in laughter and could not stop.”
In just eight short years, Martin had learned to wear the mask of his father, and Dean Martin. He thought, this is how you sing, this is how you perform, and that mask would take years for him to remove.
When kids try to act like adults, it’s easy to see. But when adults act like other adults, they can hide in plain sight.
And that is why so many adults are unfulfilled. They are under the illusion that to be successful in their chosen field, they need to put on a different personality. Even worse, sometimes they do it for so long they forget how to be themselves. They can no longer sing in their own voice. It’s all an impression.
So, what can you do?
Finding Your Voice
To do your best work, you need to find your voice and keep it f*cking real. The consistent and authentic voice that can shine through whether you are at church, with clients, or coaching Little League.
It can be a differentiator. Maybe the only guaranteed differentiator. “Escape competition,” Naval Ravikant advises, “through authenticity.”
Tom Petty doesn’t have the greatest voice in the world, but it’s authentic, and it’s him.
Early in his career, he was the leader of a Gainesville band named Mudcrutch. He shared singing duties for a time with Danny Roberts. Warren Zanes writes, “There’s no question that his [Roberts] playing and singing are as good as anyone’s in the band. He was their equal, maybe even one step ahead of some of them. But there’s little individuality in what he does. His two lead vocals come off like he knows what he should sound like but not who he is. By contrast, Petty, perhaps only because he didn’t have the ability to be anyone other than himself, is already interesting. Eccentric, personal, with a certain confidence. The songs are only beginning to suggest where he’d take it, but there’s an emerging sense of who he is.”
Petty wasn’t without influence. He loved Elvis. Loved the Byrds. When Roger McGuinn (lead singer of the Byrds) heard “American Girl,” he asked his manager, “When did I write that?” The song sounded just like him.
But it wasn’t a copy. Petty wasn’t doing an impression.
Zanes wrote, “A character comes out when Petty opens his mouth. You knew there was a story there.”
And a story, your one and only story, is very important.
The Cost of Consistency
“Your audience doesn’t want your authentic voice.” Seth Godin doesn’t entirely agree with the need to keep it real. “They want your consistent voice.”
They want you to be the best version of what they purchased.
And he is right, in the short term.
It’s true, I did go to Caroline’s to see Paul Mooney talk some shit. That’s his act. If he started doing show tunes, I would have been a little disappointed.
But can you be consistent without being authentic? In the long run, that mask can suffocate.
Remember what Twain said, “If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.”
Authenticity plays a role. A role with you!
Being authentic, or darn close to it, is regenerative. It’s a virtuous cycle.
On July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan went electric. He was at the Newport Folk Festival, and he went on stage and played a rock ‘n’ roll set for the first time.
His old fans were not happy. They wanted a consistent voice.
But he couldn’t keep going out there with his Gibson acoustic, playing Blowing in the Wind.
It’s difficult to have a lengthy career if you feel like a phony. If you are hiding behind an outdated version of yourself.
So, his old fans got to try an electric Maggie’s Farm. And the world got a few more decades of Dylan’s creativity.
Who was Paul Mooney, really?
Born Paul Gladney in Shreveport, Louisiana and coming of age in Oakland, California, Mooney polished his act in the Beverly Hills, Ye Little Club, a jazz lounge run by Joan Rivers. They called it “Mooney’s Lab,” a place he could work out his material, specifically his new breed of racial jokes that would make the mostly white patrons a bit uneasy.
He found success as a longtime co-writer for Richard Pryor. Mooney, the understudy, played a big part in helping Pryor find his authentic voice as he transformed his act from a Cosby school of comedy, clean and comfortable, into the material that made him a star. “Profane. But also, profound.”
My generation knows Mooney for his contributions to In Living Color (Homey D. Clown) and Chapelle Show (Negrodamus).
His formula was simple not easy. Shock his audience, and then sway them, by voicing their inner monologue. Saying the quiet part out loud.
Mooney said that stand-up was “the only place where a Black man can speak honestly,” and that was what his “keeping-it-real-to-the-brink-of-discomfort comedy” was all about.
He was going to find a way to make the audience shift a little in their seats. He’d create tension in these cool dark rooms by putting a spotlight on the topics you couldn’t discuss anywhere else.
As I looked left and right that evening at Caroline’s, I noticed I was one of just a few white people in the audience. My wife, my dad, and one of the busboys. Mooney could take a few shots at Justin Timberlake, but that wasn’t going to make this crowd shift in their seats.
How could he make the onlookers at Caroline’s uncomfortable?
Oprah. Obama.
He was going to tear down the biggest and brightest African Americans on the planet.
Why?
The subject of his comedy, the target of his criticism, changed through the years. But that wasn’t his act. His act was to make you feel and see something that was hiding in plain sight. Something you knew, you’d thought, but would never say in public.
From that standpoint, he was keeping it real the whole way through.
And we should all be so lucky.
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