I’m hooked on YouTube reaction videos. Why are they so addictive?

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Opinion

I’m hooked on YouTube reaction videos. Why are they so addictive?

I got dragged into it the same way I get dragged into most things these days – I typed a song name into a search engine. Before I knew it, I was watching a strange new performance art called “reactions”. The song was The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald, a ballad by Gordon Lightfoot. It’s the sad, true story of a ship that sank in a gale in 1975 on Lake Superior, drowning 29 men.

On YouTube I found people filming themselves and their reaction to the song as they listened to it for the first time. They’re professional reactors. You watch them react to songs and listen to their thoughts and if you like their reaction you subscribe. I watched one reactor after another as they became emotionally taken by the sadness of the song. A woman who thought it was about the break-up of a relationship between Edmund and Fitzgerald was blindsided by the shipwreck.

Unsurprisingly, the most solemnly, deeply affected reactors to the song are women. Men don’t seem to care so much about the death of strangers – notional, abstract death. Perhaps women are more prone to empathy because they’ve lived lives that require it to be commonplace. Anyway, empathy is an admirable trait, and I enjoy their sorrow.

At suppertime, in the song, the old cook comes on deck of the ship and tells the men it’s too rough to feed them. At 7pm, a main hatchway caves in and he reappears and tells the men it’s been good to know them. The reactors who aren’t crying when they hear this begin to cry when Lightfoot drops his voice and sings: “Does anyone know where the love of God goes/When the waves turn the minutes to hours?”

No. Nobody does. The women on the internet put their fingertips to their lips and dab at their eyes with tissues. “Ohh... just boys. And the cook knew, he knew...”

Why is a woman so beautiful when she’s steeped in sorrow? Admittedly, the sorrow of these reactors is a sanitised, compartmentalised sorrow, a brief, single-use sorrow. The sailors are already dead, and won’t be dying again except in song. So, no harm is done to them. And these reactors aren’t feeling grief. They haven’t just lost a sister, they’re receiving news, 47 years late, of a tragedy. So theirs is a kind of performative sorrow, a strange new theatre. Anyone filming themselves for broadcast is, ipso facto, an actor to some degree. Until this song works its bittersweet magic and they aren’t.

Why do I wait impatiently for their tears? Why do I enjoy their sorrow? I think it’s because watching someone express sorrow is bearing witness to the involuntary welling of all that is good in us – kindness, compassion, empathy, sympathy – witnessing sorrow is an affirmation that inherent goodness exists. And it’s a relief to be reminded of that.

Sorrow is also highly infectious. So mine is an interactive voyeurism. It’s never long before I’m dabbing at my own eyes, feeling slightly dirty to be spying on their sorrow, but also feeling connected to people I’ve never known and never will – to humanity, I suppose.

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Illustration: Robin Cowcher.

Illustration: Robin Cowcher. Credit:

And then, when I’ve had my fill of beautiful women crying over drowning sailors, to get out from under the sweet sorrow and shake it off like coming out of a trance, I move on to Stevie Ray Vaughan playing Texas Flood live at the El Mocambo Club.

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Watching reactors astonished by genius is as much fun as watching their sorrow. To watch a young rapper with no more history in his head than last year’s NBA play-offs experience Stevie Ray Vaughan for the first time is like seeing him discover a new planet ... maybe this one. The kid’s mouth will hang open and he’ll shake his head, saying, “No way. No way, man. No one can do that”. And then halfway through the song, when Stevie Ray starts playing the guitar behind his back, the reactors’ minds are blown. “This can’t be real. This is a doctored video.” No. It’s SRV.

It’s a blast watching some wide-eyed innocent stumble upon a paradise you’ve known about for years and have it confirmed that the good music of yesteryear is still good music. After Stevie Ray I’ll type in Lynyrd Skynyrd Free Bird Oakland Coliseum ’77. Let’s see if the millennials can chew on that mighty bone.

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