“Reaction Videos” have been all the rage, in the past several months. They were certainly around prior to the pandemic, but once everyone was sent indoors for a while, the preponderance of this particular format seemed to multiply exponentially. By reaction videos, I mean pretty much just that — videos of folks reacting to their first exposure to certain music. Pretty simple, really.
At first, I couldn’t really fathom why anyone would give a damn, but then I got kind of hooked. When you travel in the insufferable-music-snob circles I tend to do, it’s fairly rare to witness genuine, fresh-eared reactions, as opposed to knowing nods, deliberately esoteric comparisons and pithy summations. Reaction videos can hearken back to the first time you were ever blown away by something — like the first time you ever heard the breakneck sprint of The Ramones, the dense wall-of-din of Public Enemy or the weighty blast of Motorhead. When your tastes have been honed by years and years of listening to specific styles of music, you can forget how left-field they might sound to the layperson. Reaction videos can provide that vista.
Of course, once they took off, they kind of lost a bit of their authenticity, and it seems several proponents were just playing up their personas. You had folks essentially over-reacting for comedic effect. By the same token, those instances remain far more rewarding than the ones wherein self-appointed audiophiles studiously pick apart nuances of the song in a vain attempt to showcase their chops. It’s a slippery slope.
There’s a pair of twins who’ve made arguably the greatest impact with this format, although I remain skeptical that they’ve never heard some of the music they suggest has been brand new to them. While those two young men have yet to truly tackle any of my particular favorites, I stumbled upon one today by a producer named Mike Cross, who gamely takes on “Ten Dollar Bill,” one of the higher-profile selections by my old pals in Cop Shoot Cop.
While I was hoping Cross was going to delve into the band’s story a bit, all he really does is — well — react to the music. The fact that he’s watching the deliberately misleading music video of the single (featuring a bedraggled marching band led by a dwarf in place of the actual guys in Cop Shoot Cop, although of few of them make fleeting cameos), doesn’t really help. But, again, he’s there to assess the music.
Anyway, here that is.
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