Tag: Authenticity

Cringe – Fake vs Authentic – Viral Hit Interpretation

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/20/nx-s1-5507263/it-pays-to-be-cringe-lean-in

According to the internet, Brendan Abernathy was unequivocally cringe.

Abernathy is a singer-songwriter living in Texas who went viral earlier this year for an earnest performance of his song “married in a year.” He was relatively unknown before this moment, but the video garnered millions of views along with countless parody videos from comedians and social media users.

Ramtin Arablouei, co-host of NPR’s Throughline, spoke to Abernathy about how to cope with the criticism and shares his insights with It’s Been a Minute host, Brittany Luse. They also get into the rise of cringe culture: where it comes from, how it’s hurting us, and how leaning into cringe is good for art.

Episode Highlights
What happens when a “cringe” video goes viral?

BRENDAN ABERNATHY: It was really hard. Also, some of it was really funny. And I can recognize both of those things at the same time.

ARABLOUEI: Well, what parts of it were hard?

ABERNATHY: People were treating me like I’m selling out stadiums … I’m struggling to sell a hundred tickets, and people are acting like I’m some massive industry plant who they can just tear down. It’s like, you can’t tear me down, guys. I’m poor. I lived out of my car for four years. You can’t really tear me down any more than I’m already down.

ABERNATHY: You hope for a long time that you’re going to get a breakthrough into – just more ears having an opportunity to hear your music. And then when it happens and you’re getting mocked, laughed at, told to take your own life, you know, whatever, it – it’s just really confusing because everything that I know about myself and my music, the internet is saying the polar opposite of that. If you searched my name on TikTok, the third result was, Brendan Abernathy fake. That’s what hurt the most, was that everything I’ve built my life on, which is being authentic and being vulnerable, I was being viewed [as] the complete opposite of that. That’s what hurt. And most people who reacted negatively – it created this, ew, cringe.

The Authentic Feel of Unpolished Expression

Of course Bernard didn’t realise the song wasn’t in his key. None of us did. We didn’t know anything about stuff like that. We always wrote the music first, and what I’d always loved about Barney’s vocals was the unintentional strained quality as he tried to fit into the track. Like Ian, he wasn’t blessed with the world’s best singing voice, but it had emotion, passion, and to me the struggle in Bernard’s voice was a major part of the band’s appeal. (I agree with David Byrne, who said, ‘The better a singer’s voice, the harder it is to believe what they’re saying.’)

Substance: Inside New Order
Peter Hook

Questionable Value of Authenticity

In the 1970s, the cultural critic Lionel Trilling encouraged us to take seriously the distinction between sincerity and authenticity. Sincerity, he said, requires us to act and really be the way that we present ourselves to others. Authenticity involves finding and expressing the true inner self and judging all relationships in terms of it.

Authenticity now dominates our way of viewing ourselves and our relationships, with baleful consequences. Within sensitive individuals it breeds doubt; between people it promotes distrust; within groups it enhances group-think in the endless quest to be one with the group’s true soul; and between groups it is the inner source of identity politics.

It also undermines good government. James Nolan, in his book “The Therapeutic State,” has shown how the emphasis on the primacy of the self has penetrated major areas of government: emotivist arguments trump reasoned discourse in Congressional hearings and criminal justice; and in public education, self-esteem vies with basic literacy in evaluating students. The cult of authenticity partly accounts for our poor choice of leaders. We prefer leaders who feel our pain, or born-again frat boys who claim that they can stare into the empty eyes of an ex-K.G.B. agent and see inside his soul.

Our Overrated Inner Self
Orlando Patterson, Dec. 26, 2006
NYTIMES