"Who? Why they *sound* like this? Why she cut..."
XG "Woke Up" reaction videos
"That gotta be the craziest one in the group. Hey! Dat gotta be – She's scary, I'm not even gonna hold ya -- She is scary, and she hardest one in the group. SHE GIVIN HERSELF A CHOP CHOP IN THE VIDEO!" [Max Sigo]
So our rabbit hole today is reaction vids to XG's "Woke Up." I've watched a score of them, but YouTube's got scores more.
It's performance, mostly, the social and the psychological in physical and vocal form – more vocal than verbal, I'd say, or rather the verbal is as performative as the vocal, the YouTube content creators relying on our having the relevant society and psychology within us already, enough of it to understand the why of their response without their having to explain it to us.
Within that restriction, Max Sigo, for instance, is really good. His laugh is as good as Walter Brennan.
Oh, and if you want to get this right, watch the videos on full screen, so the XG video is large enough to see, and the content creators are larger than life.
"She said 'Gotta lift weight for the bag.' That mean her bag is BIG! As in, there's so much money in it...
"That's a double entendre. That's a bar-- as in her bag, the money bag? She said 'Gotta lift weight for the bag.' The money is heavy and you got the bags, you know, you got CHANEL, all these type of bags, it get a little heavy, you know?" [Terell]
Been merely noticing the fact of reaction vids, noticing for a while now, seeing them in sidebars, but never looked at any of them. Today, though, my feelings put me on alert, an intuition said to watch these. Maybe there was a title out of the corner of my eye, a description that called to me: "XG finna make my quit."
"Her shit just come on so clean."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7KLQbSPLug
These guys savor their surprise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZD8QySmffw
These guys act out their surprise, like in Mexican football when someone scores a goal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V5_xo2vxMY
So far, I like the chair-kickers more than the precision guys. But I hope somewhere among the ones I haven't seen yet there's a Lester Bangs or two to put it together, to bring the feeling and the body language while surprising our analysis with their own analysis rather than allowing us to settle for what's already inside us.
This guy likes internal rhymes. Asks his YouTube commenters to tell him what "unnie" means.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdKetyCyT6c
"The football helmet with the grills?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZPrXVPgEoA
"'Skirt'! and 'catchin my drift,' though? Come on, bro."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEo-4ujxltY
"She had a slight pause with 'hilarious' to make it rhyme with 'more the merrier,' right?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZxunLMD2Ak
"You just lost your mind! Why'd you just shave your head on camera and make it look fire?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lCMHXV-cmU
"'A small group but we a powerhouse' is what she sayin."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHRWIS71aWg
--Btw, I'm not a 10 on this song – I'm rarely 10. Is an 8 or 9, probably; we'll see how it shakes out. It doesn't have São Paulo's pole-vaulting imbalance or Recife's insinuating chug, or Soundcloud rap digging deep into its own dust. And being credibly hip-hop and credibly tough and braggadocious isn't the astonishing never-heard-before-from-women-and-Asians achievement that the reactions think it is. I do appreciate – adore! – the dexterity, the syllables, the various different styles of pebbles against windscreen, the differing flows, all seven of them but esp. Maya and Cocona. 8 or 9 is a good grade! The quicksand of the beat is an accomplishment; so's the Korean work-ethic (yes, I know they're Japanese but they're being marketed in Korea), Harvey: "You can tell we all made it work for us/Made it but we had to work for it/Work, work, work, so perfect/That it hurt, don't it?" and since I don't hear much these days that's in English, I suppose I should take being able to understand the words as gravy; but I'm still not hearing surprising content, not hearing a human story, an idiosyncratic biography; nor vulnerability, puzzled narratives, lost libidos, misplaced mosquitos, unmapped journeys, actual dizziness, living-your-life vertigo. But as the conformist genre exercise that this is, it is pretty damn exhilarating, moment-upon-moment topping the previous moment of pleasure, gulping up the available air pockets and sliding through every bank's time-lock. And it is a thrill, Jurin's "Rappin in a skiiiiiiiirt [screeched]/Catching my drift" (I had to look up "drift" as The Fast & The Furious Tokyo Drift and a car-racing reference, deliberate loss of traction in the racecourse turns (says Wikip), but I also love the olfactory implications of “catching my drift”!), while standing like a colossus over Tokyo.
Meta paragraph for Substack: Watching these response videos, imagining I were doing it myself. But I'm a writer. I like writing because writing – reading people's writing, that is; the actual writing can be laborious – writing is the speed of THOUGHT. I prefer the speed of thought, the rhythms of thought, to the rhythms of talk (for my writing, that is; though of course writing contains sound rhythms – I love those rhythms – and sometimes the rhythms of talk too; and I love the cadences I caught today, transcribing the video reactions). There were a total of two pieces in my life that I wrote on a cassette recorder – the raw material, that is. The pieces worked well. Preparing my Columbine story, I was sliding around, nothing sticking, and finally the only strong thing I had were words I myself had said during an interview, "They were 18 and 17..." So to maintain the rhythm, the tone, the style, I had to speak all the rest into a cassette recorder too, and transcribe and rearrange from there. I did the same with my Teena Marie piece back in the '80s. Writing it, I just wasn't capturing Teena's wide embrace, her voluptuous reach, so again I started over and went with speaking. "She stretches the words or sings them short or runs them around the block or reduces them to rhythm or just talks them or chants them." Although both those pieces clicked, I still don't want that as my style. There's a lot that's "conversational" in my writing, breaths and pauses, but it's not the rhythm of actual talk. What I want is thought, the chasing and snatching of images and ideas, their wind, their speed.
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