Reaction Videos: Hearing Great Music Again for the First Time
A new video genre is crossing generations
You’ve heard the saying: “I may be old but I’ve heard all the great bands!” that truth is happening on YouTube. A new genre is uniting several generations over music and comedy videos on the platform.
Called reaction videos, you watch commentators as they view music or comedy performances which you can also see, then they react to them. You watch their facial expressions as they listen and discover artists their generations never heard or even heard of before. They then explain their impressions and understanding of each tune or routine and give their insight into what they hear for the first time. This is like watching a relative discover some of your history and learn it was fascinating. Then they show you all you missed about the experience when you lived it the first time.
I am sure if you proposed the idea to network program executives, they would laugh you out of the office. User-generated YouTube makes an excellent platform for this genre. The videos amass thousands and tens of thousands of views with emotional comments especially on the more serious songs from the various decades.
Great music crosses generations
Vloggers rediscover the music that the parents and grandparents and their contemporaries loved when we came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. Some even bring up old comedy routines that we heard or heard of specifically from George Carlin, Rodney Dangerfield and even Abbott and Costello’s signature routine Who’s on First.
The rules of the format enhance the genre. Apparently, you must video yourself watching a video that you have yet to see and then you comment on it through the camera. YouTube also requires you to stop the video at least once, I would guess due to copyright issues. Similar to putting a watermark on a sample piece of yet to be purchased audio.
Rediscovering Classic Tunes from the golden years of vinyl
These channels rediscover the classic rock/pop/jazz/folk music and remind me of the time in the 1980s, I discovered Manhattan Transfer tunes I had no idea were top hits — forty years earlier. A friend of my parents lamenting the loss of the popularity of big band music described my discovery then as: “It is so old, it is new.”
Viewers watch the vloggers' shock, laughter and surprise and even tears as they listen to tunes and comedy routines spanning now seventy or more years.
Daniel Profeta’s channel is Dicon Dissectional Reactions and calls himself Dethstroke9 — all of which are terms that are beyond me. At seventeen years old, he is discovering tunes that I not only listened to in my early years, I spun those discs when I was in college radio in the mid-1970s at WUMB-AM. A boomer, I am old enough to be his grandfather.
He had to look up how to pronounce Harry Chapin’s last name discovering he needs to use the long a sound and not the short a which he assumed. He tears up listening to Taxi and Cat’s in the Cradle.
Jamel_aka_Jamal reacts to Weird Al Yankovic’s Smells Like Nirvana laughing hysterically. He stops the video when Weird Al gargles and in the background, a man on fire plays basketball.
I wonder if Jamel got the humor of Dick Van Patten in the crowd happily cheering along to the song — holding a sandwich which an angry fan hits out of his hand. Of course, part of that joke is that it is Dick Van Patten with his squeaky clean image, it would have worked with few else.
The vloggers often bring a focus that maybe we boomers missed when we tuned into the songs “back in the day”. They give a new interpretation of lyrics and point out the complexity of music riffs that we maybe took for granted. Of course, they listen for the cowbell in “Don’t Fear the Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult.
The great talent that is Phil Collins
TwinstheNewTrend reacting to Phil Collins’ In the Air Tonight celebrate the sudden drop of the beat “three minutes into the song.” As the tune ends they exclaimed: “Phil killed that bro.”
Jamel_aka_Jamal watching the live version of the same tune notes the slow beginning: “Here we are three minutes in . . . the anticipation, man.” He says.
The tune tempo changes as Phil Collins, the former drummer to Genesis, later the group’s lead singer, after Peter Gabriel left, takes to the drums at the crescendo opening the second half of the tune. Jamel called it well worth the wait and adds that it was his duty to do the reaction video on his channel to honor Phil Collins’ artistry.
Elizabeth Zharoff, a vocal coach and opera singer, points out how Collins annunciates his words, in the same video performance, emphasizing his message. She explains that he has an “incredible” ability to maintain a groove in his singing with rhythmic precision. Drummers, she teaches, can do this which Phil Collins is. She is vibrant over Collins’ talent. “It is really hard to play drums and sing at the same time.”
It seems that the commentators are not familiar with the songs but choose them through recommendations they find either in the comments below their videos or through other means such as their Patreon channels.
The Blind Faith album
The spread of music is large including such tunes as Can’t Find My Way Home from the Blind Faith album. Of course, the grand-folk or old enough to be so know that this was to be the supergroup of album-oriented rock in the 1970s but they split up after the one album. Hence, today it is called “The Blind Faith Album”.
The young video commentators analyze songs and bring up riffs that we may have noticed but did not understand the artistry in them. We never heard them originally in a video format which did not exist then. We enjoyed them on album-oriented rock radio, also called underground radio, all over the country. If we wanted to hear them again we needed to buy the album and either pick up the needle and put it back down on the track or worse, rewind the cassette looking for the beginning of the tune. (I never figured out an eight-track.) Mostly we tuned into the local AOR radio station. Here in Boston the biggest one was of course WBCN-FM.
Listening to their commentaries such as Jamel_aka_Jamal’s description of Steve Winwood’s voice gives us a new appreciation for the same music we heard in our day.
“No pun intended,” Jamel says after listening to Can’t Find My Way Home, “I got lost in the man’s voice.”
Andy & Alex describe their channel as: “Two college guys checking out the great music of the past for the first time.” They label the same tune as a spiritual experience.
Hearing the tunes without the backlash
Of course, now many decades later they are listening to the music outside of the political times they first dropped. They do not have the backdrop of an establishment teaching rock and roll was evil or that Stairway to Heaven was satanic. The late 1980’s New York Times bestseller The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom lamented the beat of the music was to sexual intercourse.
I had to study the book for an introductory philosophy class in a seminary. I was by then a Navy Veteran and still a rock and roll aficionado. I remember most of my younger classmates nodding agreement in class to the ridiculous idea. Bloom emphasized his point by saying that is why students love Ravel’s Bolero to which I responded: “What the hell is Ravel’s Bolero?”
Jamel laments while listening to Ten Years After’s I’d Love to Change the World, the songs are so old but “here we are in 2020 and they are still relevant.”
Andy & Alex preface their reaction video to the same tune with descriptions of the hypocrisy of many who claim to want to change the world after their rounds of golf or their five-course meal. They discovered this was not the cheesy tune they expected. The singer, (Alvin Lee), they explained, says he’d love to change the world but in truth understood he probably cannot.
Ohio
This genre also teaches history to the new listeners. Check out the reaction videos for Ohio, by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young about the day national guard troops fired on anti-war protesters at Kent State University in Ohio in 1970. They killed four and wounded another ten. I remember when Neil Young sang it in Great Woods in Mansfield, Massachusetts around the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre in protest against the Chinese. He dedicated it to the pro-democracy demonstrators.
Sori from the Channel Vin and Sori says: “That is infuriating, friggin’ sad man.” Her first words about the incident itself after hearing the entire tune.
Vin explains the song in light of the George Floyd protests going on at the time they recorded the video last year and brought concerns of both statism as well as racism highlighted by the Kent State massacre in light of the death of Mr. Floyd. One commenter to their video wrote: “the biggest mistake any citizen can ever make is to think, ‘my government would never do that.’
Dethstroke9 (Daniel Profeta) describes the tune as part of a genre that existed for millennia taking history and putting it into song. “For thousands of years that is one of the main ways we passed on knowledge of certain historical events and it is important to do that . . . someone brutally murdered by someone who is supposed to be protecting you.”
Jamel aka Jamal talked about the event and explained that Neil Young did not want these people to be forgotten. Reading from notes he found on the internet he explains that it was published ten days after the event. “It says four were killed but how many were wounded, how many more got shot?” Ten.
Daniel notes the documented history that many if not all the victims were actually innocent bystanders including some just walking between classes. One man, he reads, was paralyzed just getting into his car by the national guard bullets.
If you want to see if there is a reaction video to some of your favorite tunes, go to YouTube, type in the song’s title with the word ‘reaction’ and check out the results in the drop-down list. (Legend of a Mind by the Moody Blues has no reaction videos) There you will find various takes on tunes we’ve heard for decades and now, with these astute younger vloggers, we hear them again for the first time.