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Music Reaction Videos are a Thing
File under: “Nobody predicted this”.
So very recently an almost 40 year old song hit #2 on the Apple iTunes charts. What was the song and why?
Well, two young brothers posted a YouTube video of their reaction to hearing Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” for the first time. They were a little surprised to hear the point where the drums come in, and their video went viral; currently well over 6 million views. And this boosted interest in the Phil Collins song.
So music reaction videos are a thing. Folks set up a YouTube channel where they film themselves listening to a song for the first time and reacting to it. Viewers subscribe to the channel and make song suggestions, and apparently there’s some ad revenue involved. And it’s a way to promote songs.
So what’s happening here? A couple of things…
The music industry hasn’t really had a business model for a few decades. (I don’t consider “fraction of a penny per megabyte” streaming to be a valid business model.) Before the mid ’80s, radio stations would curate, present, and promote songs, and record sales would follow. And that worked pretty well. In the ’80s, MTV took that job over, at least for a couple of genres. And it’s been messy ever since.
While it sure had its faults, the earlier radio-and-record-based business model matched the cultural, artistic, social, market, and human nature needs pretty well. And much of that has been missing since.
So I think the reaction videos are addressing the need to say, “Hey, check this out, lemme play something for you”.
But there’s something else; modern popular music is, for the most part, really awful. Sure, it’s easy to dismiss an older guy whining about “you kids with your lousy music”. But by any objective measure, the songs on the charts are not very musical; in terms of melody, chord changes, theme and variations, lyrics, arrangements, beauty, craft, creativity, sophistication, playing skill, and so on.
So the reaction videos are folks hearing examples of this sort of musicianship for the first time.
Sometime last year I started enjoying a specific genre I’ll call “Black people hearing Pink Floyd for the First Time”. And if you do a YouTube search for “Pink Floyd reaction”, well, that’s what you see.
My favorite Pink Floyd song is “The Great Gig in the Sky”.
Modern popular music is also compartmentalized into very restrictive genres. In the ’60s and ’70s, exploring combinations of genres was itself a form of creative expression.
And while music used to bring the races together in wonderful ways, as the left has weaponized racism, music has suffered.
So I guess there’s this new genre I call “Black People Hearing Black Music for the First Time”. I kid, but this reaction to Living Color’s “Cult of Personality” is priceless:
Published in General
🙋♂️
I always assumed that young people knew the source material from childhood or from shopping where they pipe in music, but probably that is becoming steadily more rare.
Jethro Tull?
He was right about aerating soil, but not about several other ideas he had.
It’s difficult to make huge generalizations about young people, in my experience a lot depends upon their parents and how they chose to consume music. The first one is pretty obvious (kids with older parents are probably more likely to listen to and/or enjoy older music because it’s what their parents enjoy), and the second is a bit more complicated. Taste in music is important to a lot of younger people, and many who consider themselves music aficionados feel that it’s important to know the derivation of the work that they enjoy and certain ‘classics.’
Considering your Rat Pack tastes, how old are your parents? 😉
It was funny watching a couple guys with a channel on youtube listen/react to Steely Dan’s Black Cow. They weren’t more than 15 seconds into the song when they paused and started laughing and talking about hip-hop. Seems that someone had sampled the opening bars of the song and built his own composition around that sample. One of the guys kept singing the phrase “uptown, baby”. Since I put listening to hip-hop in the same category as having a severe migraine, I have no idea what he meant.
Oddly enough, I discovered this stuff on YouTube today myself. I found this guy, Pastor Rob. From the ones I watched he knows his music pretty well. I don’t know enough to comment on his theology.
I watched him discuss Distrubed’s Sound of Silence cover. 5FDP’s Wrong Side of Heaven and this one one Metallica’s Creeping Death.
Considering the fact that I like Fred Allen, about in Methuselah’s general age group. (No, they’re really 67 and 62, but my dad’s a little difficult to pin down on music of that era because of crazy strict Baptist parents and my mom’s mom liked Frank Sinatra, so I think it was older people music to her; most of the elderliness of my music tastes is my own doing).
I’ll use myself as an example for the second point. I’ve always been very fond of jazz, mostly older jazz done by African-American performers like Joe Williams, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Cab Calloway, and that led me (with the addition of a strange, specific connection), to The Rolling Stones through its drummer, Charlie Watts, partly because I listened to a song by the Charlie Watts Quintet and really enjoyed it, and partly because I was aware of the influences on the Stones without even having listened to much of their music.
Some of these folks doing the reaction videos seem remarkably naive. Not blaming them or putting them down, they’re just coming from modern pop culture. And it’s great to see their horizons being widened.
But it’s so funny to hear, “What?! Phil Collins plays the drums?! I didn’t know he played the drums!”
Or, “What is that?! A clarinet?”
Or when Donald Fagan plays a Melodica, “He put a damned piano in his mouth!”
Get thee to the Music PIT. @django and the boys probably post a lot that would be of interest to you.
Although my dad does have very strong feelings about Frank Sinatra, of the “all he does is talk, not sing, this is awful, shut it off” variety.
I’ve been indulging in this for a while now.
For me, and I imagine others, I get a kick out of exposing people to something great – and when they ‘get’ it, it’s especially satisfying. It’s kinda weird because I only discovered the song, film whatever before they did. That was my only contribution as it were. So to take pride or credit isn’t really warranted.
But it’s also rediscovering these songs again through others. Imagining I am them hearing the song for the first time. Actually many of these songs took repeated listenings before I fully appreciated them, (and I am a musician myself!) so I wonder if they are really ‘getting it’ at that first listen or if I am somehow deficient.
I truly believe the last 50 years produced a huge amount of great music that has gone under appreciated. There is currently a dearth of creative music because of the perversions in the industry.
Our entire culture though, has advanced and most of these people reacting are musicians themselves.
Let me add another similar genre – vocal coaches reacting to singers:
There’s fashion in music. That is certain directions overdominate, then someone comes along with a completely different approach, often opposite, or emphasizing something that has been lost. Notable was the “grunge” reaction to 80’s hair bands.
In Eilish’s case, minimalistic, simple, understated passion exactly the opposite of what we’ve had an overdose of. Overproduced overstated, oversexed, grandiose pop hysterics.
I agree with a good part of this, but I think that there is a lot of truly great, interesting, creative music being produced today if you know where to look for it. I tend to lean towards the Indie/Indie-Folk side of things in modern music, so that’s where I have the best knowledge of new content, but it’s true for more than one genre. There, though, Mumford and Sons, Florence and the Machine, Lord Huron, Radical Face, and The Lumineers, just to name a few, have brought new sounds, creative story telling methods through albums, and innovations in lyrical content and instrumental arrangements to the genre. Mumford and Sons also does killer concerts, in terms of music and artistic design.
As a classical musician (especially because I play a relatively uncommon instrument, the harp), people’s comments range from bizarre to hilarious. That excludes those who want you to play a particular song on demand for them, who deserve to rot in a special kind of hell.
A band that I always liked but having grown as a musician I LOVE them now:
Another aspect I see is that I am a very active listener of music. As I imagine anyone has to be to enjoy this video genre. For example, if this song is playing in the background at a party, I wouldn’t be able to have a conversation. It would intrude on my consciousness. I actually can’t listen to good music without a need to give it my full attention. I can’t understand people who put on music in the background. So these are very ‘active’ methods of listening to music.
I used to be in an early music band with a couple of harpists. I miss being in a band.
This I understand very well.
Am I jaded for thinking this is all an act?
Probably a couple decades ago by now, but I once heard a kid say, “You mean Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?”
Some probably are.
Yeah, but they were small time. Nobody important.
Some of it definitely is. I was watching one today and the guy clearly knew what was coming when the song hit the bridge. Plus he made an offhand comment in the middle about sometime you have to listen to them over and over again to [something. I forget exactly what he said, but it was pretty explicit.]
This is disturbingly accurate.
To whom did you write your last epistle?
Well, they’ll certainly get more views, and thus more income, if they are more entertaining. That’s understood. (I don’t know how the money works.)
And some of them are not entertaining at all.
But I am happy to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Eight monks, which I suppose stays with the common religious usage of that term.
Stuck in the top of a care package that I was praying would make it.