Authenticity

This post was previously published in The Disruptive Business Network

13 Feb 2022

Rick Rubin and The Man in Black?

1993 In Santa Ana California about an hour outside of LA, at the Rhythm?Cafe, a fallen legend has just performed to a few hundred people. A few years before, his label, Columbia, a label that he helped establish had dropped him. His latest album has sold less than 2000 copies. In his prime he would play to 20000 seat arenas. Here he was performing in a 500 seat dinner hall. ?He was Johnny Cash.

That night waiting for him was Rick Rubin, hot shot music producer to Run DMC, Jay Z, the Beastie Boys and?Slayer. And here he was waiting for Johnny Cash, a country music legend. Why? As Rick told Malcolm Gladwell “I thought it would be a fun challenge to do a great album with a great artist who maybe hasn’t done great work in a while. It would be a puzzle to solve”? (1)

And solve it he did. From the first awkward meeting the collaboration bore six critically acclaimed albums, seven Grammy awards, millions of sales..but more importantly made Johnny Cash relevant again? But here’s the thing When picking material, Rick Rubin had this insight: ?“subject matter would have to make sense..in this case its different because there’s Johnny Cash the human and then there’s Johnny Cash the ‘mythical man in black’. My goal was to make music that always fit the mythical man in black..”

Gladwell responds: “I thought you were going to say the exact opposite. I thought you were going to say my goal was to make music that fit the human”?

Rubin: “No, he had done that along the way, not always successfully. I think of the great Johnny Cash moments, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”, this sort of outlaw figure. Johnny Cash in real life never shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, but the mythical man in black did and we (the audience) responded...the real life Johnny Cash had a great sense of humour and we didn’t want to do any funny songs. I wanted to really focus the story on this mythical presence"? Rick Rubin had the intuition to know that the magic did not lie in the ‘Authentic’ Johnny Cash, but in the created mythical man in black.

Impact

What is authenticity? What does it mean to be ‘authentic’? The story of Johnny Cash’s rebirth struck a chord with me (pardon the pun). The realisation being that what’s important is not who you are but who you need to be. ?As Seth Godin has said, real authenticity is knowing the impact you want to create and working backwards from that. What to do is a secondary question. The primary question is who do I need to be? And how to get there from where you are right now.? And this where being ‘authentic’ wont work.? The cultural zeitgeist has muddled authenticity to mean egoistic individualism. Impact means taking stock of who you are to bring value to other people. Impact equals courage, to be vulnerable to put yourself out there, to surrender the ego, to put community over self.?

The Over-Correction

What does the NGRAM* (the NGRAM is graph showing often a phrase has occurred in published books over a selected time period). More info here ) over the selected years authenticity tell us? This is the generation of the ‘I’. However we are living through an over correction. An over correction from the collective pressure that we’ve lived through most of the 21st century. Collective pressure from family, work, religion and society meant that for most of the 21st century people weren’t free to be themselves or pursue a life that would’ve been bold or courageous.

But we have overcorrected and are now hyper-individualized. We are in this moment of the superficial self. Who am I? vs Who do I need to be? What do I want from life vs What does life want from me? Forgetting that the truth of ‘I’ is being part of ‘We”. As Charles Taylor says the dark side of individualism is a centring?of self which both flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer in meaning and less concerned with others or society.? (2)

To live a bold life is to connect with others, to put a dent in the world. The over correction has succeeded in us fooling ourselves that to escape oppression we have to escape constraints entirely. That freedom is about acting on momentary feelings or impulses rather than putting in the work to develop a true identity.?

As James Clear mentions in his book ‘Atomic Habits’ (and as I have written in my post on Habits ), outcomes are about what you set, processes are about what you do whereas identity is about what you believe. If someone offers you a cigarette, its “I’m trying to quit” vs “I am not a smoker”.. subtle but significant?

It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this

Is the recommendation here to fake it until you make it? In a way, yes. Is the recommendation here to be deceptive? No. To sacrifice your values or integrity? No. Neither is this about the illusion of perfection, of being a paper tiger on social media and getting positive reinforcements in the form of likes or sycophantic comments. This is about courage and that you contain multitudes. If you cannot create the impact that you are striving for then find an identity that can..and then reinforce that identity. This isn’t about being fake but about reinvention..which entails magnifying a speck that already lies within you

You can’t be true to your feelings if that feeling is weakness. In the depths of your being, after you machete your way through layers of doubt, uncertainty, fear of I’m not good enough..there is a strong person or a creative person or an idealistic person..a tangent to your personality whose story needs to be extracted. In each of us lies a speck, but that speck is covered in layers of ‘authenticity’ - a cultural meme that has come to represent the whims of the individual, a spotlight on the ‘I’. ?But without real work on the self, the ‘I’ is a fugazi. How many of us have done the work to truly know who we are? As Freud said “What is Self? There is no self, we are different selves at different times?”

And if the I that comes up isn’t brave enough, dig deeper. So go past Johnny Cash and find the Man in Black Authenticity is difficult. It is not the default. We have to win it.

Very ancient problem

This conundrum around authenticity isn’t a modern problem. The greatest thinkers since antiquity have wrestled with this.

Aristotle felt that the virtuous person is someone who does virtuous things for their own sake. For Kant, it was that moral worth exists only when a person acts from a sense of duty and there should be a universal rationality that we submit our processes to. Nietzsche railed against conformism and believed in becoming the ideal version of yourself which he compares to the creation of art. But he believed to accomplish that you must submit yourself to some sort of discipline. He resisted the idea that we are fully formed in utero and we just need to stand back and let the unfolding occur. The existentialists focused on personal freedom, but even Satre felt that we are constantly responsible for the task of deciding who we are going to be. Simone de Beauvoir felt that there were degrees of freedom depending on the kinds of social relationships in which we find ourselves...that we need to enhance the freedom of others in your process of becoming free.

Sooo..summing up a couple of millennia’s worth of thinking on authenticity: we are defined by certain traits, characteristics and eccentricities. Out of that comes certain freedoms but also obligations. Our freedoms are limited by needing to act with virtue for its own sake and our responsibility to others. The self in all its majesty is tempered because we are socially embedded creatures who are fundamentally defined by our relationships to others. (3)

Conclusion

“Man is not a solitary animal, and so long as social life survives, self-realization cannot be the supreme principle of ethics”? - Bertrand Russell

?What is viable? We are in the world, we live in community..not in isolation. Authenticity can’t mean living an isolated existence separating ourselves from the rest of society..being authentic can’t negate being influenced by others..not for 99% of us in any case. Maybe authenticity is not that I pull into existence a new way of life but I pull all my different obligations together (son, employee, brother, neighbour etc) and I adjudicate between them. I take responsibility for how I am going to take up all those different kinds of roles so that you find your best self to create the largest impact.

How did Rick Rubin help Johnny Cash??

He reminded him of his impact. He reminded him what struck a chord (again the pun) not just internally but with his audience. He reminded him that his revival depended on him not being ‘authentic’ to Johnny Cash the man, but to dig a little deeper and find the ‘man in black’ - and all it took was an acoustic guitar and three chords.?

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References: 1. This section is from Malcom Gladwell's incredible podcast: Broken Record. His interview with Rick Rubin is here ? Also from Johnny Cash: The Life by Robert Hilburn

2. The Ethics of Authenticity By Charles Taylor

3. This section is adapted from the brilliant In Our Time?Episode on Authenticity

Rahul Soans is the Founder of The Disruptive Business Network