I've fallen into a YouTube \"reaction video\" rabbit hole. Specifically, I've fallen down the hole where young, attractive and charismatic people who claim to have certain musical expertise listen to \/ watch music videos and show us their reactions or criticisms. There's the \"opera singer\", the \"classical composer\", the \"Gen-Z music producer\", the \"vocal coach\", the \"guitar teacher\" etc.. They all have YT channels where they let us watch them experiencing songs and bands for the first time. <\/p>\n
Now, 'reaction video' is a broad YT genre; people record themselves reacting to everything from fashion to sports to music to video games to other people's reaction videos. And they get lots of views. People love it. <\/p>\n
But why do we love it?<\/p>\n
Well, that's pretty simple. In the case of these music reactors, if you watch enough of them, you'll see the patterns: they almost always love the music; they offer some, but usually not a lot, of their insight based on their specific skill; they will always end up listening to the same set of songs. They have all done \"More Than A Feeling\", \"Mister Blue Sky\", \"Roundabout\", \"Tom Sawyer\", some classic Chicago, Janis Joplin, Steely Dan, etc.. They hit \"classic rock\" really hard. Some will venture into the 90s and even up to the 2020s. But they always come back to classic rock. The premise is that they've never heard these songs or even these bands before. And since they're usually younger people, it makes sense that they don't know all of that 50 year old music the way a 50+-year-old guy like me would. But they're not scraping the bottom of the old barrels looking for oddities, they follow subscriber recommendations. Which means they're doing the classics. Which we all already know<\/em>.<\/p>\n And we get to watch them discover these songs that we know! And they almost always love<\/em> them! And that makes us feel good about ourselves - listen to this great music we had when we <\/em>were young! Validate my taste!<\/em> And the comments reliably tell them \"I remember when this came out. it was such a magical time! Music was so much better!\" And they agree! Tell me how great I am!<\/em> One reactor seems to always say something like \"That's awesome! I wish today's music could be this carefree and bold!\" Ah, the good old days.<\/p>\n And even though I'm aware that this is exactly how most of these channels work, I still watch them. I still pretend I'm in it for the little nuggets of analysis they sometimes drop. But what really makes me smile is when they say \"Wow!\" to a song that I<\/em> already know and love.<\/p>\n Sucker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I've fallen into a YouTube \"reaction video\" rabbit hole. Specifically, I've fallen down the hole where young, attractive and charismatic people who claim to have certain musical expertise listen to \/ watch music videos and show us their reactions or criticisms. There's the \"opera singer\", the \"classical composer\", the \"Gen-Z music producer\", the \"vocal coach\", […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33613"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33613\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33622,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33613\/revisions\/33622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}