Listening Alone and Listening Together
Reaction videos are a good way to kill time and a route to reviving criticism
I’ve been meaning to write. I have had no time, even though I weirdly have too much of it.
Time warps around me as I travel through Coronatimes. A year passes, but it feels like a weekend—a never-ending weekend—and I am hungover. I work from home, leave only to visit the park or grocery store, and stay in the rest of the time since everything is closed. I’m Howard Hughes without all that money.
Beams of light have broken the clouds of Coronatimes. The most important: time with my family. The most unexpected: reaction videos.
Listening Alone
Call me late to the party, but I didn’t know a thing about reaction videos until two teens caught the attention of the media with their astonished reaction to Phil Collin’s “In The Air Tonight.”
One night, unable to sleep after a car alarm woke me, I surfed through hours of reaction videos. I made what I think is the obvious discovery: When reactions are real (and many aren’t) you get a sense of how music is supposed to be heard: with the entire body; with pleasure and fascination.
The experience reminded me of Jaron Lanier’s views on technology. If a technology impairs your ability to be human, he says, junk it. (That’s why you should delete your social media. Before you do, follow me.) For Lanier, this injunction holds especially true for music.
You know what he’s talking about. You’ve seen it. A guy with earbuds in. He’s grooving. He loves this tune. But he’s sitting on a crowded bus, and he doesn’t want to smile, or nod his head, or—God help him—dance, since showing pleasure for the music might make him look crazy. So, he straitjackets himself, eats his smile, and crushes the impulse to dance.
Lanier laments this development foisted on us by technology. Music should be felt. It should be experienced with others. Mobile technology lets you listen to anything ever written.
But you’re listening to it alone.
Against Genre
YouTube stinks with reactions videos right now. Reactions to stand-up comedy, TV shows, hit singles—pretty much everything.
Most of them stink, but the fake ones stink the most. Curious readers won’t have to look long to find YouTubers who fake reactions for the camera (and the clicks), or make claims that defy belief, like drum teachers who say they’ve never heard—or heard about—Neil Peart. (Pro tip: If your drum teacher doesn’t know who The Professor is, find a new drum teacher.)
In the category of “not stinky” I put a select group of musicians and educators who use reaction videos to teach. Elizabeth Zharoff, who posts as The Charismatic Voice, is one of these. Her reaction videos double as art appreciation and music instruction. She shares the vocabulary of her craft (now I know how to “love a vowel”) and explains where a vocalist’s sound and style comes from.
That’s great, and not a bad way to spend a sleepless night.
But the best reactions?
They belong to the non-experts, especially those listening “against genre”—meaning, they listen to music that isn’t their preferred genre, music they aren’t supposed to enjoy, like K-pop girls listening to rap, rap guys listening to metal, metalheads listening to opera. I mean people like Sushi, who delivers genuine and plain-spoken responses, and Jamal, who posts speechless responses. They show what the best music of any genre can do to a person who is willing to listen.
The best of the genre is Lost in Vegas, a channel hosted by two “free thinkers,” George and Ryan. These guys make good company. They project enthusiasm and good humour, and they never fake a reaction.
What sets their reactions apart from others is their method: they talk to each other. Most of us listen to music through technologies that close our experience to other listeners, especially in these Coronatimes. George and Ryan listen to music together on screen. They talk to each other about what they hear. They converse.
And as importantly, they always talk about what they find pleasurable. This is the basis of good criticism: To find the source and the possibility of pleasure in art.
That’s part of what makes watching them a pleasure.
A Useful Pursuit
Art ought to inspire conversation: first between the viewer and the work of art, and second between the people viewing the art. Bad art has nothing to say; attentive audiences pass it over without comment. Bad audiences, on the other hand, don’t know how to listen. If they do, they might listen badly and hear what isn’t there. (Like the bored people who find offense in every cultural artifact they encounter.)
Reaction videos have something to teach about how to be good audiences and even more to say about formulating criticism. In short: Listen for pleasure. What is good and beautiful about this piece? What is true about this art?
The expert critic will always try to make sense out of what he hears—to give context, situate a piece, and evaluate what he hears. That’s valuable, but done badly, or snobbishly, criticism devolves into snark, and in its worst forms, regulation: the critic as food inspector. (For examples, look up some of what passes as criticism of modern poetry. The critic sniffs to see if the poetry carries the scent of our current politics.)
The non-expert critic—the guys talking about how the music moves them, like George and Ryan—delivers an urgent, gut reaction. That’s sometimes more valuable, since it points us in the direction of beauty, the thing we desire.
Required Reading
Can We Cancel Foucault Now?
It’s trendy to tear down statues of dead idols who fail to live up to today’s standards. John A. is down, and so Jefferson, Columbus, and every other statue that protestors can get a noose around. With the not-so-shocking revelations that Michel Foucault was a pedophile, can we cancel him and his ideas from the academy?
CRISPR Gets Crispy
One of the most important (and ethically fraught, and dangerous) developments in science in recent years has been CRISPR technology. Natalie de Souza describes the science and dilemma in an excellent review essay in the New York Review of Books.
Is Everybody Crazy?
Reading the news each day (and twitter each hour) might lead a person to conclude that everybody is crazy. If that’s true, then the song of the moment is a forgotten classic by Michael Bolton from back in his hair band days, “Everybody’s Crazy!”
Last Word
George and Ryan from Lost in Vegas are slowly becoming experts in heavy metal. That might kill their appeal as strangers to the genre, and that might be good, since it could force them to explore other genres. How about polka? Better yet, parachute them into art galleries, snooty restaurants, poetry readings, monster truck rallies, and every other place dying for an honest, pleasure-seeking criticism.
Robert Grant Price is the author of the forthcoming collection of short stories, My Girlfriend, the Hologram.