This YouTube Genre is a Godsend
In the online world of today "white man" has come to seem synonymous with "irredeemably evil piece of shit." I'm feeling the hate, and I don't like it. But it's not just my skin and my sex that marks me as evil incarnate, I'm also old. I'm not a Boomer, so I don't get THAT level of hatred, not in the abstract. For the most part, nobody who isn't a Gen Xer themselves has anything to say about Generation X, but when young people, particularly young women, see me IRL, their facial expressions and body language communicate to me that I affect them the way a pile of rotting fish guts might.
These categories of race, gender, and age feel like yawning chasms between me and so many of the online communities that I observe but don't interact with. But I've discovered a genre of YouTube videos that make me feel good: Young, black women (and sometimes young men) who do "reaction videos" to musical suggestions that their subscribers recommend to them. The songs are often from 1970s and 80s guitar-led rock bands, and because the suggestions are coming from their audience, often with a donation attached, the young YouTubers are highly motivated to give the songs a fair shake and find value in them.
My favorite personality in this community is RogueRxyce, a young woman who sounds American to my ears. I think it's her bright smile and sparkling personality that endears her to me. She's unrelentingly positive, and I've savored a warm glow watching and listening to her develop a love of Pink Floyd and the guitar stylings of David Gilmore. Pink Floyd was a favorite band of mine in my late high school and community college days, so the familiarity and the positive associations with their songs is inscribed deep in my psyche. Rouge's first Pink Floyd reaction video was to a live performance of Comfortably Numb from 1994. Normally, I would cringe at the thought that someone's first exposure to Pink Floyd would be a post-Roger Waters performance, but Comfortably Numb has always been a David Gilmore song. David wrote it, and it features one of his more recognizable and emotional guitar solos, and this 1994 performance pulls out all the stops. Rouge responded to the song's lyrics, but it was David's guitar solo that literally brought her to tears.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWslibUABM8
Probably my second favorite YouTube creator in this genre is Empress Joy-Jean. She's another young black woman, but her accent tells me she's from somewhere in Africa. I don't know African accents well enough to say what country she is from. She too has reacted to a number of Pink Floyd songs, but the video of hers that I enjoyed most was when she watched Stevie Ray Vaughn performing a live version of Texas Flood.
I was familiar with the name Stevie Ray Vaughn before his death in1995, but I wasn't really a fan until I discovered his live performances on YouTube sometime in the last couple of years, so this isn't accessing the inner sanctum of my soul like a classic Pink Floyd song does, but Empress Joy-Jean's delight and amazement as Vaughn's passion and superhuman guitar technique touched me just the same. Here's another video in which a young black woman is reduced to tears by a white man playing a guitar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G6Zz-4YTFA
Out of sheer laziness, I won't list all of the YouTubers in this genre whose videos I have enjoyed over the last few days, but there are many. There are three young black male/female couples who make videos in this genre, and there's a duo consisting of a young black man and an older black man (who is still probably younger than me) who listen and react to old white-guy music. The elder of the two knows his way around the genre and he guides his young protégé into the land of, "Holy shit, these white guys made music with passion, talent and soul."
There are also young white YouTubers who react to the same body of songs, but I never click on their videos. I want the experience of seeing young, black people discover and appreciate the music of my youth.
One thing these YouTubers NEVER mention is the race of the performers. They never SAY, "Wow, these white men can really play." That's just the subtext. One video which many of the folks in this video genre watch and react to with wholly positive affect is a live performance of Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd. The video features the band in concert in front of an all white audience at the Oakland Coliseum in 1977, and they have a giant Confederate battle flag as a backdrop. Even with this unmissable symbol of white supremacy on screen, no black YouTuber I've seen yet has said anything about it. They focus on the music, the energy of the band, and the excitement of the crowd.
To give the young men their due, here's Jojo reacting to the album version of Free Bird (in which Jojo does mention race but only to say that he didn't grow up listening to this kind of music): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjwubox38lE
As ugly as race relations have gotten in this country in the last couple of decades, these (mostly) young YouTubers are helping to heal our societal wounds and close what have come to seem like unbridgeable gaps between us. Or that's what I imagine anyway as I sit here alone (except for my cat) in my apartment watching YouTube on my Roku TV during this interminable COVID isolation.