There are, of course, differences in both quality and quantity when it comes to critics and reactors on YouTube. Some reactors and critics seem, at least to me, better than others in that some of them actually do pay attention to what they are watching and listening to and some, if generally only a few, do actually grasp the various levels of meaning in what they are watching or listening to. SoFieReacts reviews of Buffy, for instance, are, to me, quite impressive. SoFieReacts reactions consistently reveal a reactor/critic who grasps what is going on in a very complex television show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show that works on several different levels, and who can explain quite succinctly what she sees and hears going on in the show. This makes these reactions much more interesting to me than the usual reactions one finds on YouTube, reactions which seem to me to be YouTube's simulation of Gilligan's Island.
My take on most reactions on YouTube doesn't mean that there isn't anything I find interesting about the mass of reactions on YouTube. Most of the mid quality reactors on YouTube are interesting less because of their specific reactions and more because of the nature of reactions themselves. By watching Buffy reactors react to Buffy, for instance, the viewer is able to hold a kind of mirror up to oneself, a mirror that allows one to recall what it was like to see a specific episode of Buffy for the very first time in his or her viewing lives.
YouTube critics, a least hypothetically are a somewhat different species from YouTube reactors. Many of them, well at least the best of them, take the music they are listening to seriously and try to, if not always successfully, analyse it. Here is the rub, however. The problem is that even the best and brightest of these critics seem to me to be latter day versions of critics like Pauline Kael, Lester Bangs, and Robert Christgau from the 1960s and 1970s. I really don't like, for intellectual reasons, the autobiographical and personal form of criticism that characterises the "criticism" of Kael, Bangs, and Christgau as it has always seemed to me a type of criticism that is little more than a form of criticism grounded in the assumption that you deal listener should like what I like because I am Pauline Kael, Lester Bangs, and Robert Christgau, and I am oh so witty and oh so cool.
There are two Kael, Bangs, and Christgau style critics who ply their critical trade on YouTube that I have problems with. I have already discussed my problems with one of them, the two bright College StudentsYouTubers who call themselves Alex and Andy. In this brief essay I want to talk about another clearly bright critic who I sometimes have problems with, JustJP. Now don't get me wrong, I like JustJP and I find almost all his critical reviews interesting. He is clearly bright, clearly attentive to the music he is listening to, and he often listens to more challenging and less popular genres of music than do mainstream YouTube critics who wouldn't touch this music with one of those proverbial ten foot poles. Additionally, he often brings a degree of cultural capital and of music appreciation to his YouTube videos, something I really appreciate, There are, however, other moments when I just don't think JustJP really gets it. For instance, in his review of Yes's "Cans and Brahms" and "We Have Heaven", JustJP doesn't seem to fully grasp the intentions and functions of psychedelic head music like that of the British band Yes.
Yes, of course, arose in a popular music scene in which psychedelic music was prominent. There was, for example and perhaps most prominently in this genre, The Beatles "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "I am the Walrus", both songs which experimented with sound, music, and words. JustJP doesn't seem to get the fact that some late 1960s and and early 1970s psychedelic music was experimental, as was the era, itself, that the psychedelic music of the era, music like "We Have Heaven", played with soundscapes in such a way as to try to expand the minds of its listeners, and that when one listens to "We Have Heaven", Jon Anderson's piece on the seminal Yes album Fragile from 1971, one has to let this consciousness expanding song and its play with words and sound wash over you. When one does, I think, and let me emphasise the I think here since ultimately beauty and value is in the socialised eyes of the beholder, it is absolutely clear how astounding this head song is.
My sense is that many young people, including JustJP and the two college students, Alex and Andy, come from younger birth cohorts and as a consequence of historical distance and a lack of education in music appreciation, simply don't grasp, intellectually or emotionally, how psychedelic art music works and how it functions. This is a pity since, after all, if we want to appreciate music (or anything else for that matter), we have to kind of go native and try to understand the context in which the music was written and the meanings the writers and musicians were trying to convey to the listener, before we can go all me, me, me loved it, couldn't get into it, or hated it on its arse.
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