You may be aware that there is an entire subculture of reaction videos for things like pop songs, movies, viral videos, etc. This consumption-as-production genre features a host watching or listening to a piece of media and reacting in ~real time. Of these, I’ve most sampled the reaction videos to pop songs. These videos presume that it’s entertaining to watch people watch things; I’d say much of the entertainment comes from the still-evolving postures and rituals of the reactors knowing, expecting, and perfecting their craft of reception for an audience. It’s an interesting constellation of attention.
I’m no historian of the form, and I don’t quite care enough, nor have the spare time, to moonlight as one. But I do remember the first time I learned about this as a burgeoning media form. You all might recall the famous Breaking Dawn reaction from YouTuber NuttyMadam:
The Twilight fan’s response went viral because it was relatively novel; her highly exaggerated responses may or may not have been “phony,” they might have represented excessive attachment to the movies, but they certainly made for compelling content. The emotional journey charted by NuttyMadam’s face and body and voice provided an answer to the question as to why anyone might care to watch someone else’s real-time response to another insignificant piece of media. I believe it was around this same time, or not long after, that some other modes of “reaction video” emerged, usually focusing either on extreme fandom (like NuttyMadam) or on people watching very gross or disturbing videos.
In the years since, ambitious YouTubers and influencers have experimented with different formulas to respond to music or other content, which they are often hearing for the first time—or claim they’re hearing for the first time. In order to skirt copyright and claim fair use (more power to ‘em), many of these channels find ways to foreground the “criticism” element: pausing liberally to add extended commentary, perhaps cutting the songs up or changing the pitch, mirror reversing the image or filtering it, and so on. The results can be both interesting on a human level (look at these oft-inauthentically “realistic” real time human reactions to music I know!) and yet also deeply frustrating (because you typically don’t get to hear the song all in one go, and if you like the song, you kind of wish the reacting spectator would give themselves a chance to listen to it all at once, too; they often pause right before, or in the middle of, “a good part”). Your mileage may vary on these points.
I believe a key video in this subgenre gaining even more mainstream traction was the viral response of the Twinsthenewtrend channel, and the fellas’ reaction to “In the Air Tonight”—particularly the famous drum fill. A few years after this video dropped, the setup seems charmingly low-tech and unpolished. “Authentic,” even.
I don’t have a theory of reaction videos or anything like that, but I share these notes and impressions because I think it’s useful and important to try to verbalize our perceptions of all the weird and subtle shifts in media circulation as they’re happening. I know that at least a few media scholars have projects on this trend, and I welcome others’ observations on this kind of thing, or adjacent media forms. Some key features that stand out to me from my unsystematic browsing of the pop music reaction video:
Some reaction videos are to lyrics vids, or live performances, or something else. But if there is an original music video that goes along with the song, the reactors will often interpret the music and the video together, as if they are of a piece (rather than the video representing one possible expression or interpretation of the basic material of the song itself). See what I mean, in reaction videos to Sugarland’s “Stuck Like Glue,” whose video is about a crazy-wannabe-girlfriend-stalker, but whose song content, lyrically, isn’t.
Seemingly anything can prompt an exaggerated facial expression or gesture of surprise, pleasure, etc. These responses are enunciated; they are often telegenic, or un-telegenic in an attention-grabbing way. One pulls the exaggerated face (for the screenshot, mind you) and gesticulates as though one just can’t fathom what one is hearing.
It can be interesting to see the gray areas where reactors, as a community, do of course play up the affects and the effects, but where these are often tapping into something that feels a little more, dare we say, genuine. James Blunt’s “Monsters,” a sentimental song about a parent’s mortality that is pretty disarming in its sincerity, is maybe the key example of this: there are tons of videos on YouTube of people really, as they say, “feeling their emotions.” Ugly crying. But then again, in its semi-viral function, the song kind of sets people up to have this response. “OMG, 45-year-old Marine cries to James Blunt. THIS BROKE ME.”
And then there are examples of reactions that seem wildly different from how mainstream audiences received them just a generation ago. How many middle-schoolers cheerfully rapped along to “Changes” when it came out in ‘98, but, times change, and witness below an adult whose immediate and public response to Tupac’s opening lines here is that, between the happy beats and the line about “blasting myself,” the song is “escalating quickly” and she is “not ready for that.” Will Ferrell said something “escalated quickly” in Anchorman years ago, and the memeification of that phrase has, too, contributed to the aesthetic calibrations of an American(ish) population raised on imitative gestures. How do you just, like, begin a song by talking about blasting yourself?
The video below is a great example of how these content platforms and the sheer performance of novelty can cross-fertilization into semi-incoherent texts. Here, the hosts talk about this being the “first time we heard this song,” while also waxing nostalgic about how it reminds them of the end of the 2023 Guardians of the Galaxy movie where it played, I gather, over the end credits. (Nevermind that “Badlands” deserves a better fate than any of this.) Meanwhile, the visual content they’re reacting to is a CGI lyric videos, which was uploaded to the Bruce Springsteen channel last year—I assume intended to coincide with the Guardians movie—and one of the hosts also promotes an OnlyFans account. Commercialization all the way down!
Reactors rarely look up anything about the songs. One might think this would be one of the intuitive advantages of the format: you could incorporate research into the response. But instead, the ignorance becomes performative because it is a pretext for engagement. You ask your viewers, even if you only have a dozen people subscribing to your channel, “is this song a cover?” or “did this really happen to the singer?” or “what actually happened in the summer of ‘69?” You don’t look it up because, as a matter of form, you’re relying on viewers to comment and engage with what you don’t know or what you get wrong. You’re incentivized to say things that will get people commenting and sharing. (Additionally, if we take them at face value, there are a lot of self-professed music-loving people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, onward, who would have us believe they’re listening to a lot of extremely famous music for the first time. Sure.)
Interpretation, meanwhile, gets diluted when it does appear. It’s superficial even among those channels that seem to emphasize their analytical bent. (This is not unlike what you’ll see if you look at lyrics annotations on Genius: let’s say a song has a line, “She broke my heart and I cried so much.” The Genius annotation is likely as not going to be something like, “there was a woman in the singer’s past and she hurt him in some way, so he was sad, which he expressed by crying tears.” This kind of thing has just one redeeming facet as far as I can figure: it can help translate “obvious” idiomatic expressions for people who are not native speakers of the language.) Meanwhile, the singer is of course usually identified entirely with the narrator of the song, which makes more sense in some cases than others. Musical analysis, too, is pretty shallow; there is a subset of reaction channels that come from “vocal coaches,” “music teachers,” “classical composers,” and other practitioner-experts. Occasionally these can be informative. But more often, these experts don’t explicate so much as they ooh-and-aah and occasionally quibble in a way that refers back to their own self-proclaimed status as expert. (I watched one video where a guy proclaimed the Lumineers’ drummer as his favorite drummer of all time. (???) I don’t even know how to fathom that kind of statement, and I—admitting this guiltily—like the Lumineers.)
Again: I’m only sharing some notes. To the extent that some of this material depresses me, it’s depressing because it involves a kind of living-at-a-remove; living vicariously. It’s numbing to imagine living life by publicizing our consumption and making that our production, our craft. (Perhaps we, the remnant children of the twentieth century, were just paving the way by staring at our screens so much; perhaps that way was paved by novels and photography…) However, the charge of “living vicariously” sounds less judgmental in the framework of a postliterate environment than it does from a primarily literate one. The line between receiving and giving, consuming and producing, might be conceptually fuzzier, and the inauthenticity or exaggeration we see could simply be a function of that environment. The boundaries between ‘your’ and ‘my’ and ‘their’ existence, while still operational, are perhaps less porous or less pertinent. </dilutedMcLuhan>
And, indeed, if I am honest, I can understand the tiniest bit some of this brave new world. I am, after all, a person who has by now spent some cumulative hours (hours!) watching videos of people watching videos.
I think in an upcoming dispatch I might try to tie some of this into something more theoretical … for now, please feel free to add to the observations, the counterpoints, the evidence …
I can't pretend I haven't watched my fair share of reaction videos too, but it is a fascinating trend and it's not something I feel particularly great about when I am watching it. I think people really like to have their tastes affirmed, even more so if its by a person or group of people who would not be considered the 'normal' target audience for a piece of media. I can also seem like a form of anti-snobbery, i.e. if a classical composer likes one of your favourite songs that must mean it's great, and you have great taste!
It's an interesting one to ponder. I don't think wanting other people to like the same things we do is a new thing that didn't exist before the internet - but now we have a perfect platform to have that same itch scratched on a much larger scale. And the inauthenticity and hyperbole of a lot of this content, as you mentioned, is a little bit disturbing. Some of the reaction videos can definitely be fun, and some can be insightful, but I can't say I'm too encouraged by the normalisation of inauthenticity.
"Christians react to heavy metal songs about Satanism (or other pop culture about the occult)" is one variation on this format I've noticed.