BIGQUINT INDEED’s videos open with a warning: what you are about to hear is going to contain a whole load of bad words. If you can’t handle it, then it’s best for you to step away. It then cuts into a room, and Big Quint himself either seated or pacing around in tremulous anticipation for the Event: the music-listening. He tears the curtains down: “What up y’all, Big Quint,” extends into a monologue about the hitherto-unspoken expectations surrounding what is about to be experienced, and then he stops himself short so things can truly get going, gesticulating with his arms, a final warm-up routine before it all ends, a performance within a performance: “Let’s not waste any more mother****ing time. [artist name], [album title], first reaction, let’s (clasps hands together vigorously)****ing go.”
It is a strange phenomenon: we watch somebody get absolutely turnt (read: excited) to the music we love (or hate, or simply haven’t even listened to) rather than listening to the thing ourselves. Big Quint, in his well-viewed Kendrick Lamar reactions, rises up from his chair, jumps up and down, rolls his whole body around, even storms out the room when the song’s bass rattles the walls, and he howls with sheer fervor. He is gripped by the music, absolutely. As with Kendrick Lamar’s DNA, a song of grandiose proportions, he pulls himself out of the room, as though performing how the song pulled him out of his body, and the video abruptly cuts to him being back in the room (what happens between these cuts?), sitting back on his chair, and having it break under the weight of all the hype. “My chair – it broke!”
It is not a question of whether he is being genuine, or even if it truly is his first time listening to the music. In a sense, we know why we are here: to watch a performance. Big Quint is performing his listening. Rather, he is performing all of our listening. It is sheer energy, gratuity, flows of energy bursting at the seams. He channels something empty in us, or perhaps have lost – a reaction, a feeling. He shows us what to feel, how to feel it, and how much of it to feel. The grittiness of DNA almost seems unreal until Big Quint shows us so, hence the anticipation people accord toward the release of these videos, almost co-extensive with the release of the album itself. He shows us the music listening experience par excellence, limitless hype. It mirrors the critic-rating phenomenon, of review-aggregate websites telling us what to feel towards specific films and albums, but this shows us nothing new: we always follow a consensus. Our opinions have always been given to us. But when has this ever been the case for our experiences? And furthermore, what does this say about how we listen to music today, and of what we expect from our music?
Reaction videos, of course, only cover those musical movements that whip up cultural storms: hip-hop, contemporary R&B, and K-Pop, among others. There would be no conceivable reaction video, for example, to the latest art pop album from Julia Holter. And why should this be the case, besides the lack of wide appeal? Perhaps the experience which a Julia Holter album incites is not the type that ruptures forth from somebody, that could conceivably be watchable. A video, after all, is a spectacle, and the music reaction video is pure spectacle. A spectacle demands our attention from the first measure, pins us down by sheer force. There is something loud, almost violent to it. Something about it does not permit us to look away. Pulling us to look is some unnamed necessity that keeps us plugged in. And what if culture itself becomes a large spectacle, dragging us in without a clear out?
Spectacle, of course, is largely sustained by an illusion. It is bells and whistles, it hooks us, and it exists because it meets our desire to be entertained. Spectacles have been made for ancient kings throughout history. They require a suspension of reality – they are precisely unreal, a supposed break from a reality that is disjointed, beyond our control, and largely unentertaining. Yet here we find the ‘unreal’ to be a political qualification: most of the music which we would label as bombastic and unreal are inspired by conditions that are so extreme as to be unreal. Kendrick Lamar’s breakout album good kid, m.a.a.d. city, with kinetic flows and rolling beats, is interspersed with portraits of the grim reality of life in inner-city Compton – murder, gang violence, domestic abuse. The album itself seems to be an assault on the spectacularization of such life within mass media: that the fast lives and blazing cars portrayed in spectacular media endorses and even profits off lived realities of violence that affect real people and effect real deaths.
But allow me to elaborate on that spectacularization. Guy Debord, a 20th century French social theorist, made the following claim: “The spectacle is real.” It is not that we forget what is real. Rather, the spectacle itself becomes real. It replaces reality. Real life becomes organized and experienced like a spectacle, where experiences are expected to play out like the dramas that unfold on our screens. Everything plays out according to a formula, the images that we are presented with in media: relationships resemble those in rom-coms, bodies adhere to those in billboards and advertisements. Our very lives become spectacles, open for viewing by all who follow our Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook feeds. And music taps into the primal impulse of desire which fueled the spectacle to begin with: music is fast, loud, and perhaps overly dramatic, without any tendency for subtlety.
And what of music reactions, which was where we began? This current trend has twofold consequences, both for the reactor and the viewer. The reactor takes the music at face value: he harnesses the spectacle, the energy dormant in a track. The music effuses from his body. He embodies the spectacular: the sheer high arrested in Kendrick Lamar’s HUMBLE bursts forth from Big Quint’s body, his face contorted as though he were possessed, limbs and torso flickering on our screens. He surrenders himself to the music, and is assimilated into the spectacle. And as for us, viewers: we plug into the spectacle, as we already do every waking moment of our lives. Wired to the social network, we have little else to do. At the same time, the music listening experience is distilled to us: ecstatic, sheer release, pure feeling.
But the reaction video has unique consequences for the music experience: it is almost as if these YouTube music reactors listen to our music for us. Spectacles play out our lives for us, our desires playing out on the screens. Yet here we find a contradiction inherent to such a system: if the spectacle becomes reality, where did the previous reality go? Kendrick Lamar already gave an answer: it’s right there. It never left. People are still losing their lives. The spectacle functions by suppressing all ambiguity, all that is undesirable. It forces us to adapt to it, to wear our bodies thin to become desirable and to strain our eyes as we wait for new images to be delivered on our screens. As Bojack Horseman learns cruelly in the latest season, “the show must go on.” Yet if we take the spectacle at face value, it would certainly seem that it were reality. It becomes possible to imagine that the music reaction becomes the music listening experience itself, that we will soon forget the difference.
This may all seem excessively bleak, yet there is one crucial difference with the spectacle I have described and the spectacle we are all familiar with: we love the spectacle. We cannot live without spectacles; it nourishes our reality, enriches our inner lives, expands our possibilities. Kendrick Lamar knew this as well: the only way to be heard was by creating a spectacle. For such mediums, as history can attest to, are powerful channels for powerful messages, capable of rousing us to something much greater than ourselves. Kendrick Lamar’s career is a magnificent representative of the inspiration that a spectacle directed to humanistic ends can evoke. Affirmative, incisive, and ultimately joyful: like a world-historical speech being delivered to the masses, a spectacle guides us to our transcendence.
Big Quint, then, can be recast: he is a disciple to the prophets. Like an angel, he sings his praises without end. His videos are hardly reviews than they are worship rituals. We bask in the spectacle. It can renew our lives instead of taking over them. It can affirm life itself: that a beat can go this hard, that many people think the same, that many people can share that joy, embodied by that dancing figure who carries us onward, exhausts the music for all that it has, revels in all that which it can still give for repeat rituals, repeat listens.
There is a place in our lives for spectacles, when our lives are not reduced to them alone. For the flipside to such a reality is the patient, immersive slow burners, their little lights discernible only to those with the eyes to see, their little drones picked up by the ears that have learned to love silence. To put our senses to rest and allow the music to come through to us, as purely as it possibly can is meditation. Yet music reactors offer to us such a meditation that is anything but quiet, that is restless, purely engaged, even cathartic. Moments of wordlessness, utter reverence, such as when Tabby is pressed to his seat when the second half of SISTER/NATION comes on his Saturation III reaction: “You can tell when I’m ****ed up by a song when I’m not doing anything.” To stand before an artwork in its sheer singularity – or rather, to just catch all the feelings – is something we can learn from them as well. This moment comes only after Tabby has been thoroughly shelled out by the gauntlet of tracks that preceded this one, which finds him leaping, skipping, throwing pillows, making epileptic fits, and teasing hyperboles: “Best Saturation. Best cover, best beats, best production, best flows, best vocal mixing. Video’s over,” without even being through half the album. This tension between kneejerk receptivity and stunned veneration is the space of the encounter with music today, and perhaps with all art, a direct rupture in the endless everyday stream of images which Roland Barthes calls the puncture, through which we learn to take up arms and live. In other words, if you’ve ever thought a song has changed your life, then you should listen to that thought. Never let it go. Let it break out of you, a spectacle among spectacles.