Reaction Videos

One more subterranean sign that the era of woke racism is ending

Editor’s note: Today we are pleased to welcome Max Cossack to our Substack roster of authors. Max in an author, attorney, composer, and software architect (he can code). His most recent novel is High Jingo. He lives in a dusty little village in Arizona with his wife and no more cats.

P.S. I am a huge fan of the “reaction video” style Max analyzes here, and may just have to offer a few of my own favorites at some point.

—Steve

My wife is a retired professional standup. She is fond of playing videos of standup comics for friends unfamiliar with the comic’s work.

For one thing, she enjoys it when her friends enjoy what she enjoys. Her pleasure in this project mystifies me. I do not care whether other people enjoy what I enjoy.

On the other hand, I can rationalize what she is doing this way: as a professional comedian, she naturally approves of and wants to highlight professionalism in comedians generally. She is striving to maintain the standards of standup comedy.

I feel a bit like that as a musician. The frequent sight of tens of thousands of people cramming themselves into an amphitheater to scream over some lousy musical act confuses me. What is it these people are loving so much? Is it the music or, more likely, some social experience alien to my psychology?

Once, many years ago, the premier jazz magazine Downbeat held a year-end party. The magazine hired the great pianist Art Tatum to play for them. The jazz saxophone pioneer Charlie Parker wandered by and sat in with Tatum.

This was a rare sight and sound. The inventor of bebop was making music with the premier pianist of the earlier stride piano era.

In a room buzzing with jazz critics who ought to have paid close attention, none did. They were too busy chatting up the secretaries or nattering on about themselves to bother about these two geniuses performing a duet never heard live in any club or concert, before or after. I personally regret not having been there myself.

Which brings me to a relatively new social media phenomenon called the music “reaction video.”

Reaction videos are just what they sound like: people make videos of themselves reacting to songs. Viewers watch the reactors react and listen to reactors’ assessments of songs and performances.

I watch music reaction videos on YouTube. There are probably other venues, but I am not familiar with them.

One rule of the reaction video genre is that the reactor must be experiencing the song for the first time in his life. Sometimes the reactor will recognize the song as one he may have heard before, for example, as background music in a movie, and that fits within the rules, especially when the reactor explains that this is the first time he has heard the entire song as a standalone entity.

Of course, a reaction is not a review. Professional critics publish book and movie and music reviews in reputable magazines and newspapers and other legacy media. They purport to guide us ignoramuses into listening only to what is approved esthetically, or more often, politically. Of course, the legacy critics often disguise their political prejudices with bogus references to esthetic criteria.

Also of course, most of us have caught on to their pathetic deceptions and have learned to ignore these reviewers and critics, just as we ignore legacy media hacks ranting about Trump/Hitler and the alleged Israeli “genocide” in Gaza.

Reactors generally make no pretense to objectivity, which makes sense, since they likewise make no claim to qualify as experts. They are usually just ordinary people who look and talk the way ordinary people look and talk. This is part of their appeal.

In their pursuit of pure reaction, reactors often express unashamed emotionality. But they can impress with their acute attention to musical quality, for example to a singer’s intonation, a drummer’s sense of time, or other essentials of musical craft.

Often, a reactor will make a video series in which he travels from song to song on a journey of personal exploration. A hip-hop fan might want to learn about country music. A millennial might want to learn about the Beatles. A classical musician reacts to pop singers and their songs.

On his exploratory journey the reactor will welcome suggestions from genuine fans of the genre or the act he is exploring. After all, if one wants to learn more about country music, the logical people to ask are country music fans.

Copyright laws prevent playing songs straight through and thereby force reactors to break up the songs and interject commentary. This is a good thing. Otherwise, the reactors add no value.

Although not all reactors are black, black reactors seem common, and as near as I can tell, constitute the majority.

For one thing, once he accumulates enough YouTube subscribers, a reactor can turn a profit. Reactors are entrepreneurs staking out as their own an entirely new business model.

One refreshing aspect is that these black reactors rarely display any race-based bias, at least in my experience. Black reactors do not shape their reactions to follow guidelines imposed by CRT or DEI of any of the other culture-stultifying alphabet-soup trends from current academia.

I am sure there are exceptions, but no reactor I have watched claims that the Beatles stole their entire act from Little Richard or Chuck Berry. That is, black reactors do not talk like the black people we hear in legacy media and academia.

You know who I mean: the ones who operate as if it is their profession to be black and to defend their imagined turf.

One reason for their commonsense approach is that reactors are not suicidal. They do not enjoy the billionaire backing a Joy Reid or other nasty hack gets from some legacy university or TV network. Reactors have to earn their credibility one video at a time.

Or the lack of bias may be yet one more subterranean sign that the era of woke racism is ending.

A reactor does not care whether a song is new to the world. The song to which he reacts need only be new to the reactor. A reactor’s fans might ask the reactor to listen to some relatively ancient pop act like The Andrews Sisters or Benny Goodman or Bing Crosby.

Why not Bing? In 1940, when there were only 130 million people in the entire U.S.A, Bing garnered a weekly audience for his radio show of 50 million listeners. A smart music appreciator might be curious as to how the crooner acquired his overwhelming market domination.

Reactors do not listen to songs in any particular order. They prefer the haphazard approach, which for me is exactly the right way to explore music. One finds something one likes and then looks for something else like it. That is how it has always worked for me.

This approach is something like a kinesthetic learning style, in which the learner bounces like a pinball from bumper to post, accumulating information as he goes.

Reactors thus navigate by association rather than by any rigorous order. One Beatles song leads to another without regard to whether the Beatles recorded the song early or late in their career, or whether the musicians are just the four Beatles or a much larger ensemble.

In fact, country music reactors will often start with more recent songs and then progress to earlier ones, a sensible approach for someone searching for the roots of a genre or of a performer’s style.

Reactors have their own fan base independent of the fanbase belonging to any musical acts or genres. Reactors then harvest suggestions from their fans, a process which gives the chance to participate in the reactors’ journeys, for example by suggesting favorite songs or performers. They even have Patreon supporters who pay them to react to specific songs.

So what do the viewers get out of it? They must derive some value. Many reactors have hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Subscriber get the chance to follow along with the reactors, learning about songs and acts they did not know about.

The experience of listening to music is a private one, even when listening in a group. But a reactor provides another human being to listen with. Even a person living alone can listen along with a reactor and feel as if there is someone else also there, also present, sharing the experience.

A reactor can also act as a friend whose judgment one approves of, who affirms or rejects one’s own personal judgment, as in, “This is so cool: This black woman on TV loves the same song I love.”

The pleasure of this affirmation may be a close relation to the dopamine hit one gets from a “like” or a “share” on X or Instagram or any other social media.

I have my own reactions to the reactors, although I will avoid taking matters one step too meta by making a video of myself reacting to a reaction video.

As the Talmud says, “Who is wise? He who learns from everyone.” Pirkei Avot, 4:1.

There it is: I confess. Even after devoting decades to listening to and making music, I continue to learn from reaction videos, especially about how and why music moves us. For the small amount of time I have invested, that is an excellent return.

I cannot end this article without linking to an example. Here is the beautiful Nigerian lady Empress Joy Jean Amadi reacting to “Here Comes The Sun”.