Oh the pleasant pain of waiting impatiently for someone to understand the point! Oh the power of dramatic irony; the smug joy of knowing something they don’t.
Oh how I wallowed in these feelings and more, when YouTube sucked me into a genre I had previously known nothing about: First Time Hearing videos, where people film themselves watching the music video of a song they’ve never heard before and grace viewers with their impromptu reactions, thoughts and facial expressions.
Even before noticing the six-figures-plus viewing counts and the apparently endless number of people vying to deliver more, I instantly clocked all the trappings of the very best attention economy traps. You know: the immediate, certain knowledge that – despite your best intentions, growing hunger, thirst and backpain; despite the increasingly urgent pleas of your neglected children – you’re just going to slump there swiping your finger for hours until your higher brain finally kicks in.
The first one my algorithm mugged me with was from US rapper Black Pegasus, who told us he was listening for the first time to Tim Minchin’s song Prejudice.
The tension of the format works best if the viewer is familiar with the music. In this case, I was aware that Minchin’s song – an entertaining muse about how offended people get by a six-letter word made up of “a couple of Gs, an R and an E, an I and an N” – is a very long tease that he’s about to say something racist before (spoiler alert, sorry) he doesn’t.
In this particular case, with an unsuspecting Black American listening and recording his reaction.
It has received 324,000 views.
That was mildly entertaining, I thought. So when I clocked the hello-i-am-here-to-help-you-get-addicted column, I clicked on another video from the same guy: his FIRST TIME REACTION to Midnight Oil’s 1987 hit Beds are Burning.
If Tim Minchin was the gateway drug, I’d just found the good stuff, the main line. I believe I have watched every single person on the internet recording their reaction to their first time listening to (and watching the video of) Beds are Burning. Like all good addicts I couldn’t tell you how many hits I took. Hours passed like minutes, and minutes passed like days.
Tension is a big selling point in these videos, and it’s often ratcheted up multiple times, mid-song, by use of the pause button. Sometimes they talk for ages in the interregnum, trying to puzzle out the lyrics or hook. What’s this guy going on about? Why does he look so funny? Is he Or-Stralian? Why have I never heard this before? (The answer is that young people are far too busy swiping through short-form video to absorb the full cultural canon.)
Sometimes it might be a brief “This slaps!” Yes, you solemnly nod, I know. I know this song and you do not. I am in charge here. So I will keep watching. To the end. Whether it be a couple who call themselves The Wolf Hunterz and realise they have heard it before after all but inexplicably push on, or an almost incomprehensible Glaswegian thrilled by the song’s “minning”.
Some vloggers are quicker than others in picking up the theme. Some are hampered by mishearing the lyrics (Dereck, poor Dereck, thought “the birds are burning”). Some take a while to warm to the music. Everyone’s first reaction is that Peter Garrett has a funny voice.
And then, sooner or later, their eyes widen. I love watching it happen. The chorus soars. The message sinks in (except for Dereck). The alchemy of music, politics and passion got them. Some, I think genuinely, cry.
Ohhhhh yeahhhh.
Now completely surrendered to the algorithm, I watched some First Time Hearing of Land Down Under and Who Can It Be Now – and possibly more. It’s hard to say. Finally, I found myself watching First Time Hearing John Farnham singing Help and I realised I had fundamentally broken my brain. It was time to delete the app and seek professional help for my back.
