What’s Going On With Kyle Mooney’s Music?

A Brief Review of "The Real Me"

I’ve been a casual fan of Kyle Mooney for around a decade now. My first exposure to his comedy came in the form of this youtube video sent to me by a friend:

It’s a clever little sketch, one that satirizes not only Southern California stereotypes (bomb ass Mexican food, anyone?) but also the forced stoicism men of all stripes face, and the awkwardness of reaching out for help or articulating difficult emotions. As a depressed 22 year old this was right up my alley.

Awkwardness is a hallmark of Kyle’s comedy. There’s an implicit understanding that much like Nathan Fielder or Eric Andre, Kyle Mooney is a character, and everyone around him is fodder for his work. So when I learned that he was releasing an album’s worth of original songs titled The Real Me I was curious. What kind of music would this goofball conjure up?

The songs themselves are extremely lofi spoofs of common songwriting tropes. There’s a confessional love ballad (ILY), an ode to easy California living (California Summer) a lamentation about technology (Digital Society) and clocking in as the longest track at 2:53, an angsty, quasi-epic rock tune about being your own harshest critic (House That’s Haunted). Kyle delivers lines like “hanging out in the sun, man it’s really fun, holding on to my bottle of beer” in a deadpan talk-singing that often sputters out mid-stanza. The production (or lack thereof) consists of what sounds like a cheap Casio keyboard, an acoustic guitar, and Kyle’s vocals with absolutely no processing or effects. It sounds like a nineteen minute long iPhone voice memo.

Taken at face value I thought the whole thing was somewhat amusing. A sort of anti-music-as-anti-humor joke on itself. Yet, in the context of the album’s promotional efforts, I felt a little put off. You see, Kyle Mooney has insisted that this project, true to its name, is a reflection of his real feelings and real inner self. “This is art that’s earnestly me,” he says in a YouTube video “there’s no walls, there’s no boundaries… I promise there’s nothing comedic about the Kyle M. project.”

So… is the joke on himself? Or is the joke on earnestness? I can’t seem to figure it out. My feeling of put-off-ness stemmed from a sense that perhaps Mooney is mocking actual musicians with actual aspirations. Musicians the world over wrestle with how to express themselves in an authentic, unpretentious way, is the joke on them for trying to?

The internet also seems unsure of what to make of this. A reddit thread about the record gave me little clarity. One user described the music as “unlistenable” while another swore that the songs were “absolute bangers” and that the amateur production value was the only thing that made the songs jokes in the first place. I asked my friend Lucy if she’d heard the album. She told me she’d never heard of Kyle Mooney and then mistook him for Jake Novak (the infamously bad Hamliton-esque rap-singer whose self-taped Tik Tok audition for SNL was so cringeworthy it got him bullied off the internet).

There’s actually something to that: if my friend mistakes one comedian’s joke album for another comedian’s sincere efforts doesn’t that prove my earlier point? That really the message here is “don’t bother trying because sincerity is cringe?”

Or maybe the joke is on me. After all, I’ve been thinking about this for days and have now written hundreds of words about it. Perhaps getting people to stream the record and say “what the fuck am I listening to?” really was the point all along. If so, I can only tip my hat to a well-played gambit.

(Listen to the album yourself and let me know what you think.)