This is a reaction video, a minor interest of mine these days. As the title says, we have a Gen Z musician reacting to a Boomer hit, Chicago's "25 or 6 to 4." This particular tune interests to me because I performed it many times back in the Ancient Days with the Saint Matthew Passion, a jazz-rock band in Baltimore based out of Johns Hopkins. Andiroo is himself a musician, keyboard and producer, so he loves making technical comments about the music. He obviously loves this tune, the intricate craftsmanship of it, as though that kind of intricate craftsmanship was a rare commodity in music.
To me, and the guys I played with, that's just how music is, and none of us were professional musicians. We were just college kids – well, young adults – performing music we loved. None of us regarded our own technical skill as particularly evolved, not on the level of Chicago. But we performed this tune, and others, well. To me, and many musicians I've played with since then, that's simply what music is about. No (particularly) big deal.
In this video, I (a contemporary voice specialist) analyse “Righteous Brothers” performing “Unchained Melody” (Live in 1965) on the fly, whilst watching and hearing it for the first time.
Watch me adoringly describe Bobby Hatfield’s incredibly classy use of vocal technique, obsess over his ingenious switch-a-roo between Mode 1 & 2 (head to chest voice) and dive into to the magic of contrast. In this video, I analyse the composition and vocal performance in depth. I explain and demonstrate the vocal techniques (from an anatomical perspective), and ultimately tell you what I think makes this so great.
I love this video. I love the song and performance and have listened to a half-zillion times in the last two years or so. And I love both Lolli’s spontaneous reactions and her explanations of vocal technique. She thinks about the voice like I think about the trumpet. And there’s some cross-over between the two. She talks about manipulating the vocal cavity to influence the sound. Trumpet players do the say thing, though we don’t quite have the same range of control because of the constraints imposed by the instrument itself.
BTW, I'm treating this as a media note because I want to draw some attention to the reaction video as a genre. Now that I've posted this I'll probably post some more reaction videos.
Though I am hardly a Girardian, I recently found myself exploring Girardian themes, mimetic crisis and sacrifice, in Steven Spielberg’s 1975 Jaws [1]. It made Spielberg’s career as well as that of John Williams, who composed the score. Generally regarded as the first summer blockbuster, Jaws has received extensive analytical commentary. It was entered into the United States National Film Registry in 2001 by the Library of Congress.
I hadn’t seen the film when it first came out, though I certainly heard about it and I’d heard John Williams’ two-note “Jaws” motif I don’t know how many times. I forget just how I came to watch the film on Netflix several years ago. Most likely I saw it on my homepage and said to myself, “Why not?” I watched it, was shocked at the appropriate times – for example, when the shark first comes up behind the Orca, Quint’s boat, prompting Sheriff Brody to utter the best-known line in the movie, “You’re gonna’ need a bigger boat” – and then went on to look through the movie’s Wikipedia entry. I may or may not have also watched Jaws 2 back then.
I decided to revisit Jaws a couple of months ago and watched the film several times, making notes. I went through Jaws 2 as well. It isn’t as good as the original.
“Why,” I asked myself, “is the original so much better than the sequels?” Two things struck me rather quickly: 1) Jaws 2 was more diffuse than Jaws, and 2) there’s no character in the Jaws 2 comparable to Quint. As an example of the first, consider the way the last two fifths of Jaws is devoted to the hunt while Jaws 2 wanders from plot strand to plot strand the entire film. As for Quint, I asked myself: Why did he (have) to die? Sure, he’s unpleasant and likely a misogynist, but that is not sufficient in itself. Something more is required.
That’s when the light went on: Girard. Quint, not the shark, but Quint, is being sacrificed for the good of the community. That in itself didn’t answer my question, why must Quint die? But it revealed the nature of that death. In so doing it gave me a way of thinking through the question.
Caveat: This runs a bit long, 4.7 K words. So pour yourself a single-malt and settle back.
Imitation, sacrifice, and René Girard
As you may know, René Girard [3] is a theorist of imitation, desires, violence and sacrifice. His core concept is that of mimetic desire, a desire which one person acquires by imitating the actions of another. Take Albert Hitchcock’s 1955 film, To Catch a Thief [3]. Cary Grant plays John Robie, a cat burglar who is retired to the French Riviera along with the rest of his gang, all of whom have been paroled in recognition of their work for the French Resistance. A recent string of burglaries leads the authorities to suspect Robie because the burglaries follow his old modus operandi.
In the (somewhat involved) process of trying to clear himself Robie arranges to go swimming with a young heiress, Frances Stevens (played by Grace Kelly). Robie arrives at the beach where he is met by Danielle Foussard (played by Brigitte Auber), who is the young daughter of one of his old comrades in the Resistance. They swim out to a raft where Danielle proceeds to flirt with Robie. Frances swims out to them, sees Danielle flirting with Robie, and decides that she will pursue Robie. She is imitating Danielle’s desire. In Girard’s terms, her desire is thus mediated, it is mimetic desire. Danielle and Frances thus become rivals and rivalry can lead to violence. Though we don’t know it at this point in the movie, Danielle is the cat burglar. She too is imitating Robie.
Mimetic desire can also operate at the level of a whole community. Girard explains in an interview with Robert Pogue Harrison:
There are signs that communities—archaic communities, but even modern communities, all communities—are subject to disturbances that tend to spread to the entire community contagiously, through a form of mimetic desire. If you have two people who desire the same thing, you will soon have three, when you have three, they contaminate the rest of the community faster and faster. The differences that separate them collapse. And therefore you go toward what I call a mimetic crisis, the moment when everybody at the same time is fighting over something. Even if that object disappears, they will go on fighting, because they will become obsessed with each other. And as that conflict grows, it threatens to destroy the whole community.
What happens to end that sort of crisis? My answer to this is that one particular victim seems to more and more people to be responsible for the whole trouble. In other words, the mimetic contagion moves from desire to a specific victim.
When this happens, everybody becomes hostile to that victim. Ultimately, that victim is going to be … the only technical term that exists in English is “lynching.”
The lynching of a victim, of a single victim, causes the community to be reconciled against that victim. Therefore that victim is hated as being responsible for the trouble. But immediately after, if the trouble ends there, that victim will be worshipped as the one who resolved that conflict. [4]
That is the situation we have in Jaws, though it is somewhat disguised, as these things tend to be. The shark provides the disturbance. Quint, the shark hunter, is the sacrificial victim. That he plays that role is not at all obvious, for he is killed by the very shark that disturbs the community and brings it to the point of dissolution.
To see this we must follow the film with some care. Though I provide a good deal of summary, you might want to consult the synopsis at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).[5]
The mayor of Shark City
Jaws opens in the evening. A young woman goes skinny dipping and is attacked; we don’t see the shark, but we do see her struggle (first victim). The mangled remains of the young woman’s body are discovered on the beach the next morning. Sheriff Brody (played by Roy Scheider) decides to close the beaches, but he is countermanded by the mayor and his (businessman) associates. The town’s economy depends on the summer tourist business and that requires an open beach. That conflict will grow in intensity and frame the first half or so of the film.
The beach remains open until young Alex Kintner is killed during the daytime (second victim). The beaches are closed and town meeting is called. When Brody announces that the beaches will be closed the outcry is strong enough that the mayor responds, “Only 24 hours!” At the same time the mother of the dead boy offers a $3K reward for the shark. Someone at the meeting asks, cash or check? At the close of that meeting Quint (Robert Shaw) speaks, doubting that those seeking the reward will succeed and offering to kill the shark for $10,000.
The waterfront becomes jammed with boats owned by or rented by shark hunters seeking the reward and the glory. Locals and out-of-towners crowd the streets and the boats. Boats and people collide. Here’s how the situation is described in the script by Carl Gottlieb and Peter Benchley:
The Amity Pier area is a minor madhouse: out-of-state cars elbow local vehicles for parking space at the foot of the dock, and a parade of bounty-hunting townspeople, islanders, off-islanders, tourist, and others shout and push their way onto the crowded pier, each carrying some bizarre or appropriate tool for the real or imagined capture of an unarmed shark of indeterminate size.
Rods and reels, drop lines, crossbows, slingshots, harpoons, shotguns, rifles, nets and tridents; every fishing supply store and sporting goods house within a hundred miles has been cannibalized to equip this weird array. [6]
In Girard’s terms, Amity Island is deep into a mimetic crisis. It seems that everyone is reduced to shark-mania and colliding with one another as they compete for the kill.
There is a brief reprieve. A large tiger shark is killed; people smile and chatter happily. The editor of the local paper fully expects the news to carried nationally. People jockey for position alongside the shark in the photograph, a scene that brings out the mimetic and competitive nature of the shark hunt. Not everyone fits, only those directly involved in the kill along with the town dignitaries.
Meanwhile, Sheriff Brody had contacted the Oceanographic Institute and asked them to send a shark expert. When the expert, Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfus), sees the shark, he doubts that it is the killer. It is not large enough. That night Hooper and Brody cut the shark open and search its stomach for human remains. There are none. They take Hooper’s boat out to see if they can find the shark. Instead they find the body of a local fisherman, Earl Gardner, in his demolished boat (third victim). The mayor and his allies continue to believe the shark has been killed.
Consequently the beach is open for July 4th and the island is jammed with tourists. People are initially reluctant to enter the water, which is being patrolled by police boats, but the mayor coaxes friends to enter the water. Others quickly follow. There is a moment of panic when some kids played a prank with a cardboard shark’s fin. Just as people calm down the shark reappears and kills a man (fourth victim).
Sheriff Brody insists that the mayor hire Quint and give him his asking price of $10,000 (plus, it turns out, a $200 per diem):
This summer’s had it. Next summer’s had it. You’re the mayor of Shark City. You wanted to keep the beaches open. What happens when the town finds out about that?
The mayor agrees, pleading that he was acting in the town’s best interest, noting that his kids, too, were on that beach.
At the beginning of the film the shark is just a shark, big, nasty, and evil, but just a shark. It kills first one, and then another person. Still just a shark. But then the town goes into a frenzy hunting the shark, feeling good that the shark’s been killed, posing for pictures, and making the national news. This activity has the effect of dissolving the shark and the town into one undifferentiated hybrid creature. Through the myth-logic of mimetic crisis Amity and the shark have coalesced into Shark City. Shark City exists, not as a physical object in the world, but as a mental object in the minds of people, the imaginary people in the film, and the real people in the audience (that is to say, us).
I’ve been watching various reaction videos this last week, see examples in this post: Contemporary reactions to blue-eyed soul from 1965, Righteous Brothers [time travel in music]. I’ve been aware of and watching analysis videos (there’s on in that post) for somewhat longer; here someone will offer fairly extensive analysis of a performance in another video. There may be a few analytical remarks in a reaction video, but very few. Remarks in these reaction videos are generally more evaluative often little more than expressions of pleasure. Wikipedia dates them to the mid-2000s to 2011.
As the term suggestions, such a video shows people reacting – for the first time! – to another video. These reactors apparently devote their channel to the genre. These reactions, of course, are themselves performances. By this I do not mean to imply that the reaction displayed is fundamentally fake or forced, but only that the reactor is certainly aware of having an audience and is intent on pleasing that audience. Would their visible movements and audible sounds be the same if they were simply listening in private? In at least some cases I suspect the video performance is an exaggerated version of their private reaction.
Why is the genre popular? Obviously people like to see other people reacting. But why? To model or validate their own reactions?
I have certainly taken pleasure in watching all these reactions to “Unchained Melody” by Bobby Hatfield of the Righteous Brothers. It is a powerful performance, but I wouldn’t have watched just the performance so many times. I wonder about regular consumers of the genre? Do they watch many different reactions to the same performance, or is that just something I’m doing because the genre itself interests me? I don’t know.
For that matter, why has this performance received so much attention? Yes, it IS powerful, and is from way back in the ancient days of 1965. Most of the videos I’ve watched are of Black reactors. It is quite clear they are interested in the fact that Hatfield is white but singing in a style that is identifiably Black. That disparity is certainly of interest to them, but to me as well.
But what is the general case of reaction videos? Are the reactors usually responding to music that is beyond their normal range? I’d guess that it is. I’d guess that that is the appeal, to them, and to their audience. But I don’t know.
There’s some interesting research to be done. But not by me. Takers, anyone?