The Thing About Jamel_AKA_Jamal ...

... is that he's the best thing on the Internet right now. Give yourself a few minutes.

It'll turn into an hour or two.

 

The whole "reaction" genre has exploded in the last year or so; there are dozens now.

With some I suspect it's a long-term troll; feigning utter ignorance of the Beatles for instance. And there's one dipfucker who just carries on an endless Beatles troll project: obtusely contrarian long-winded and faux-artistic reviews of all their albums. If you hate the Beatles, I don't care, no law says you have to like the Beatles. But doing ass-backwards "reviews" of everything they did just to lampoon fans' pomposity, has to get monotonous after a while.

I probably watch J_aka_J and India Reacts the most. A couple of years ago I used to watch "Squint Reacts" and "Hip-Hop Head/Millennial Reacts," but both of them seemed to quit abruptly -- no advance notice, nothing about less frequent or numerous reviews -- they just stopped. And that's OK too -- no law says you have to make reaction videos. If it's no fun, walk away.

 

I did notice there are a shit-ton of reaction videos, especially to Bill Burr bits. Most of them ruin the Bill Burr experience.

Jamel/Jamal is genuine though. Intellectually and spiritually honest to the music he's experiencing in the moment.

 

There seems to be a "reaction league" made up of the 10 or so leading reactors, who tend to cycle through some of the same songs in quick succession.
Part of it is reliving to some extent the communal experience of the 60s into the 90s, when everyone discussed new music as it came out. But now with the added feature that everybody has access to Google and Wikipedia and can look up every detail on every song they want to.