An underreported sign of aging is the development of a habit of watching YouTube Reaction videos. This is the genre of video in which a young person or a pair -- frequently a married couple-- of millennial age or younger takes requests to watch -- and specifically to "react" to-- a movie, a video or song that they have ostensibly never heard before. What makes the genre skew old is that in order to increase the viewership, the thing reacted to ideally must have once been popular; and to increase the chance that the reaction is fresh, the requests tend to incline toward the vintage. The pleasure in watching these for me is vicarious and nostalgic -- it affords the viewer an opportunity to view a fondly remembered song, movie (comedy routine, cartoon, vaudeville act, youtube video) through new eyes as though for the first time. Done well, it's an addictive art form. An embarrassingly large percentage of my frittering is spent watching these videos, particularly by far most frequently, reactions to songs.
As such, I've observed some features of the reaction genre that the most successful have in common. First and foremost naturally is the adherence to the premise of freshness. To this end, the reaction video addict is on the lookout for assurance of a "First Time Watching" for at least one of the hosts. (In the absence of a first time viewing, the reactor gets points from me for admitting it's a re-watch.)
Second, the selections or requests that do best are the best songs. A handful of reactors share my general tastes and interests in songs and artists somewhat off the beaten path; but the reactors I tend to watch the most have a lot of reactions offering a little something for everyone.
Third, the reactions hit harder if they exhibit a little something on the reactor's part that can pass for depth of analysis and sincerity. Not all reactors get this right, but a surprisingly large number or them do.
But even more important than sincerity, Fourth is broad open mindedness to genres, styles, tastes, and appeal of a song-- a gameness for the catchiest hits of the one hit wonders, the most tired workhorses of classic rock, the cheesiest of the cheese, the artiest of art songs.* Whatever is thrown at them, the most successful reactors are loath to yuck anyone's yum. Naturally, at times the tension between openness to the redeeming qualities of a song and sincerity of the reaction is going to be stretched to a breaking point. But the most successful reactors seem to have a consistently open personality to both the song (and for that matter to their partner's commentary.)
One of my favorite channels is hosted by a couple who started two or three years ago barely knowing how to tell a Beatle from a Kink but who have developed into creditable connoisseurs of the popular song of almost any era. Their output of 3 videos a day is above average in prolificacy. While watching any of their videos is almost always rewarded with consistently high quality reactions and sophisticated analysis, it's inevitable that not every song they select for a reaction is going to be of the same quality -- or even of any quality.
Case in point, the other day I discovered that my favorite intrepid reactors were honoring a (sadistic?) request for a reaction to Paper Lace's 1974 atrocity "The Night Chicago Died." I hesitate to name any song the best or the worst of all time. But The Night Chicago Died which I hated from the first "Glory be" which is to say a minute into the first time I heard it polluting the airwaves in its unaccountably long heyday in my youth, invariably pops into my head as a prime example of a turkey whenever I'm asked to conjure one.
It starts out promisingly enough with a dark synth siren but takes a sudden jarring veer into icky bubblegum territory and never looks back. Never mind that the event the lyrics recount never happened, that Al Capone never waged a war with Chicago police in which 100 died, that there is no such place as East Chicago in Chicago. Never mind that the lyrics are repetitive, inane, lazy and a ridiculous bathetic mess. If Chicago died it's because it was musically murdered in this song. The rhythm that it settles into after its spoken introduction is a dull 4/4 but in spite of its presumably heavy subject matter, everything proceeds with the goofy momentum of an uninvited party clown springing into the room unannounced. The lead singer has an annoying bubblegum rasp (see Micky Dolenz of the Monkees or the lead singer in the fake group The Archies, or the guy from America, or Steven Stills, or 'How Do you Do?' dropping Mouth & McNeal's Mouth (or is it McNeal?))-- like fingernails on a chalkboard. The "harmony" when it happens at all is unimaginative thirds above the melody line that are screeched louder than the melody. Usually the "harmony" is just a falsetto an octave or two above the melody-- the sort of thing that makes Queen unlistenable to me. The whole thing is sprinkled with overwrought underthought frills like the boinging twang of guitars that accentuates the second line of each chorus and the ejaculated string of Nanana's before the echoing of the title in the refrain. (And how many times can you fit the words "The Night Chicago Died" into three and a half minutes? With 3 codas the song is harder to kill than Chicago.)
As a child, and even re-listening to it tonight as an adult it's the kind of thing that would make me want to bury my head under a pillow until it's over. In light of this, I could not help but regard it as an act of cruelty that it was suggested to a couple of innocent reactors. I wanted to flee when I saw the title of the video but prurient interest got the better of me and I couldn't look away. I had to see what they would do with it. To my horror they started bopping to it, seemingly transported by its grabbag of cheap musical gimmicks. It took me two watches to realize that as per usual they had toed the perfect line between their personal integrity as critics and their code of treating every new musical experience with openness and fairness. If my need to have my disgust validated was disappointed, I had to admit I was not in the right place. The reactors took the high road with the suggestion. Their secret, I discovered, was in focussing not on the quality of the song as song, but on the novelty of the song as experience-- "This one took me by surprise." "I was not expecting this." Props were given sparingly, but I could tell from the mysteriously abundant fans of the song in their comments that they had navigated the rocky shoals with aplomb. I had to hand it to them. They did not let Paper Lace win.
~~~~~
* A Fifth element of success for reactors is apparently resisting requests for the videos of Don Henley who is notoriously surly about the uncompensated use of his music by those who would profit from whatever clicks such reactions would generate. As many qualms as I have philosophically about intellectual property and copywrite assertions (and I do not make money from my own writing let alone from the videos I feature), I might be somewhat more sympathetic to Don Henley (another bubblegum rasper come to mention it) if I hadn't had more than my fill of his music over the years.
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