Music reaction videos fun when they’re not forced

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/01/2021 (1827 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Mr. Rock N Roll screams and falls to the floor before stomping about his room like a WWE wrestler psyching himself up for a grudge match.

“Whooo — the boys are BACK!” he shouts. “Nothing like brand-new Aka Daka.”

That, for the uninitiated, would be AC/DC, Mr. Rock N Roll’s favourite band, which has just released its first new album in six years.

Mr. Rock N Roll — heck, let’s be informal and call him Rock — is modelling a tight-fitting schoolboy uniform, just like his axe-master idol, Angus Young, as he waxes bombastic over AC/DC’s new single, Shot in the Dark for his latest YouTube reaction video.

If music is your default setting for all things online, spend any pandemic downtime on YouTube, as I did during a recent at-home convalescence, and it won’t be long before your feed is flooded with reaction videos, that curious genre in which people record their reaction to hearing a new or well-known piece of music for the first time.

Rock, whose YouTube channel has 63,000 subscribers and counting, is purportedly hearing Shot in the Dark for the first time. His giddy joy is off the charts, more apropos for someone who has just won the 6/49 or is greeting the birth of their first child.

“I could talk for hours,” Rock enthuses. “I love, love, LOVE this band.”

Rock’s over-the-top enthusiasm doesn’t ring your (Hells) bell? Try Two Rocking Grannies (125,000 subscribers), who shared their own reaction video to Shot in the Dark (Ed’s note: the video can’t be viewed in Canada for some reason, so a different example is included below.) Seventy-something sisters Nana King and Granny Haze aren’t a couple of gonzo geriatric wild-childs — they really look like they could be your grandmother, the same one who spoiled you with fresh-baked cookies and whose harshest cuss word was “sugar.”

But they know their Aka Daka.

“A lot of times you hear people say: ‘AC/DC always sound the same,’” Granny Haze says, with the measured and reasonable tone of someone dishing out an obvious life lesson. “That’s the best part about them. Some bands can evolve and they need to — not this one. This one just grabs you and you are in for a lifetime party, in my opinion.”

Reaction videos are nothing new to YouTube. Remember the Red Wedding? In 2013, when HBO broadcast the notorious Game of Thrones episode, fans who had already read the books and knew what was coming recorded the gobsmacked reactions of unwitting friends as many key characters met their end in a shocking bloodbath.

These were reaction videos in the truest sense of the term, capturing the unfiltered reactions of people in real time, many of whom had no idea they were being recorded.

Fast-forward to 2020 and reaction videos, music ones in particular, have become a commodified, branded product, reliant on their producer’s often exaggerated, and sometimes suspect, expressions of auditory ecstasy.

Last summer, Indiana brothers Tim and Fred Williams hit the reaction video jackpot with their first-time listen of Phil Collins’ 1981 hit In the Air Tonight. The reaction video has an astounding 8.1 million YouTube views to date and sent digital sales of the musty classic skyrocketing.

Outside of justifiably vilified heavy hitters brought low by #MeToo, it’s hard to think of an entertainer in recent years who’s suffered as precipitous a fall in the Pop Culture Index as Phil Collins. Overexposure turned mention of his ‘80s chart toppers into punchlines. Su-su-sudio? Enough already. So-so over it.

But when the Williams brothers turned their attention to In the Air Tonight, watchers were won over by their genuine shock and delight, and reminded of what made the song so great in the first place.

“We’re doing this to show people that it’s OK to listen to different types of music,” Tim Williams told The Sun (U.K.) in an interview last August. “We’re black and we’re supposed to listen to rap and that’s it. We want to change that. Music is for everyone, and there ain’t no colour to it.”

The sincerity of the Williams brothers aside, these videos rely on the strength of their reactions to gain traction, the more head-smacking, eye-popping and jaw-dropping the better. While proponents can argue reaction videos are all about the joy of shared experience, that artifice can sometimes bring the whole exercise into question.

Check out any number of reaction video channels, many of them hosted by African Americans, and the goal for many watchers, judging by their comments at least, would appear to be less about the communal experience of listening to music and more about confirming their own musical biases.

“I’m glad to see the younger generation enjoy the older music,” comments one man after watching The Life of Shaq’s alternately face-melting and slack-jawed reaction to hearing Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Freebird for the first time.

“I must have watched your reaction 20 times, just love how the younger generation reacts to real great music from my generation,” another watcher comments.

It’s really a one-sided equation. While Shaq might be open to hearing all kinds of music, it’s unlikely the commenters quoted above will be giving Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly a listen anytime soon.

Music is both one of life’s greatest pleasures and one of its greatest wonders. What is it about a particular sequence of notes and sounds that can make us happy or sad or ready to punch out a slab of frozen beef like Rocky Balboa? Why do bagpipes make so many people cry for very different reasons? What is it about The Price is Right theme song that sparks a strange excitement in listeners and an urgent need to “come on down?” (Sorry, maybe that’s just me.)

And why do we care what others think, even strangers, of the music that moves our butts or shakes our souls?

Count me guilty. Over the holidays, I posted a link on Facebook of Darlene Love performing Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home) on the Letterman-era Late Show.

Do I really think anybody still unfamiliar with the song needs to hear it, or am I asserting, needlessly, my own musical identity?

Music critic Carl Wilson took a deep dive into the question of taste and identity in his 2007 book Let’s Talk About Love.

“What I came to in the course of working on my book… is that taste isn’t the end goal,” Wilson says in the new book On the Record: Music Journalists on Their Loves, Craft and Careers.

“Being able to examine your tastes, being aware that other people have different tastes, and thinking about what the relationship between those things means — that is a vehicle to get you to a conversation that’s more interesting than ranking things or just proclaiming the superiority of one thing over another,” he wrote.

Well said, Mr. Wilson. But seriously, have you heard the new Aka Daka? It’s their best in years…

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca