Todd In The Shadows

[Random Internet Person]

Spoiler: Keith Urban ft. Carrie Underwood-"The Fighter"

Twenty-three years and some weeks ago, roughly around Valentine’s Day 2001, Nicole Kidman danced her way out of Scientology’s clutches, bouncing out of her lawyer’s offices in triumph after signing the final divorce papers with Tom Cruise. Five years later, she remarried, to a fellow Aussie, country singer Keith Urban. Keith and Nicole aren’t as high-profile as Nicole’s last marriage – it’s very hard for anyone in country music to reach Tom Cruise’s level of fame – and, working in two entirely different spheres of showbiz, it’d be hard for them to connect their two careers the way Tom and Nicole did. But they’re certainly a very visible couple – at every single awards show, be it in Nashville or Hollywood, there they are on each other’s arms (and it always jarring because they make no sense to be there until you remember who they’re married to). It's been nearly twenty years since they met and they’ve been one of the most steadfastly, even boringly happy couples in celebritydom.

I don’t have a lot of strong feelings or attachments to Keith Urban, whose long career happened during a time when I was mostly not listening to country music so I can’t say I’m very familiar with his oeuvre. I associate him mostly with two songs. One of them is “You’ll Think of Me,” a breakup ballad that got a tiny amount of pop crossover and which I can only describe as “simpering.” The other is “John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16,” an absolute all-timer in literally-just-a-list-of-things country music (Nashville’s most disreputable subgenre). He reads as a Hollywood pretty boy, with his earrings and boyband blond streaks in his hair, his pretty tenor with a minor twang that doesn’t really seem natural.

So I’m not particularly interested in him as a person or an artist, but I do like celebrity gossip, and something about “The Fighter,” a single from 2017, catches my notice. Allegedly it was inspired by, of all things, “Marvin Gaye” by Charlie Puth and Meghan Trainor, the worst song ever written; Keith says it made him want to do a male-female duet, and I hope that was literally the only inspiration he got from it. Fortunately, it doesn’t sound like that. It’s… fine. Lyrically, it’s not super-interesting. But the title line makes my ears perk up: “(And if I get scared?) / I’ll hold you tighter / When they’re trying to get to you, baby, I’ll be the fighter.”

I’m sorry, but who the hell is “they”? Urban says the song is about their early courtship, and how Keith won Nicole’s heart after her painful breakup. Sure, the song is about love, not the past, and winning the heart of a divorcee is a difficult and rewarding endeavor and the kind of thing you write a song about. Nicole tries to speak about Tom as little as possible these days and I’m not sure Keith has even mentioned Tom in public ever. But the song begins “I know he hurt you,” “he didn’t deserve you” – whether intended or not, that’s a straight shot at Tom Cruise. And Urban singing that he’ll fight off anyone who tries to get to her? Knowing what I know about Scientology, and the extremely weird circumstances of Tom’s divorce to Nicole and then to Katie Holmes, it does make me wonder. What exactly was Nicole scared of, who was coming after her, sixteen years after her divorce, that made him write that?

This is probably not the first thing anyone notices about “The Fighter” – the first thing anyone notices is that it’s not a country song. I almost wouldn’t call it selling out because that implies that he’s watered down his sound; instead, it’s so radically different from his sound. But, country music eventually picks up all the discarded sounds of yesteryear, and Urban has never been the most authentic of country singers, so who better than him to pick up the gated drums and synths of ‘80s pop, right?

Actually, there are lots of people better than Urban to do this, we’ve lived through two decades of ‘80s nostalgia and it’s really not a neglected sound in music. And yet, Keith Urban does add something to this sound, something I have difficulty defining, something that’s definitely not there in the throwback works of Dua Lipa or The Weeknd. Certainly, he throws himself into it, playing his guitar in his short-sleeve tee and his duet partner Carrie Underwood (never cuter) in a Flashdance torn sweatshirt. I can’t really think of a song that sounds like this, not from today nor really from the ‘80s – “The Fighter” literally uses the same chord structure as “Never Gonna Give You Up,” and makes the same promises in the lyrics, but I wouldn’t mistake one for the other.

I think what Keith Urban adds to the equation, the thing that The Weeknd or Dua Lipa do not, is his country-star earnestness. There used to be a place for guys like that in mainstream pop, pretty po-faced white guys whose blandness only underscored their sincerity. Keith Urban wound up a country singer because that’s the only place that would accept a guy like him but in another time he could have been a Corey Hart, a John Waite, a Rick Springfield. Something about the way he carries himself and strums his guitar in this video makes me think he’s been trying to be Bryan Adams his entire career; on this track, far more pop than anything Adams ever attempted, Keith outdoes him.

What synthesizers do for Keith Urban is clarifying, but what they do for Carrie Underwood is revelatory. Despite coming right out of the gate with two or three massive crossover hits, Carrie Underwood has resolutely stayed in her lane, never once attempting to escape the safe confines of Nashville (and becoming one of the vanishingly few female singers to have sustained success doing so). That might be to protect herself from the vagaries of the vindictive country industry, or it might just be lack of interest, but “The Fighter” shows that she very easily could have been a dance diva. Carrie’s oeuvre tends toward the rock-ier end of country, stuff that lets her belt full-force (and indeed she already had an ‘80s power ballad in her catalog, Motley Crue’s “Home Sweet Home”, not to mention the many she sang on “Idol”) and the sweaty synth-and-guitar ‘80s could have been good for her too. But it feels like she doesn’t have enough songs in her catalog that actually tap into her essential wholesomeness. In “The Fighter,” she sounds loose and like she’s actually having fun, and in the video she is adorable, bouncing around and dancing in a way that I am just not accustomed to seeing her. The video is barebones (maybe evoking the cheapo videos they used to make for these kinds of songs) but it allows the chemistry between Keith and Carrie to shine. They look like two people who actually enjoy each other’s company.

Despite its blatant attempt at crossing over, “The Fighter” did mid numbers both on country and adult contemporary. I never once heard “The Fighter” on the radio, but I was living in New York City, a place that’s allergic to country music (and to decent radio stations, for that matter). Keith, though never the most authentic of singers, has always kept one leg in country music ever since (he did make a guest appearance on a Rita Ora song this year which I don’t recommend listening to). I don’t think this is a huge loss, since “The Fighter” falls pretty short of greatness; Urban says he wrote it quickly, and it shows. (The first verse in particular is so half-assed that calling it a first draft seems too generous, it’s more like an adlib. “Your precious heart is a precious heart”? Come on, Urban. Try harder.)

Still, there’s something about the song’s cuteness that lights it up. Urban has a little video with his wife on his YouTube page where they turn the song on and sing along. “Oh my god I love this song!” Nicole squeals with mock surprise, it’s a joke but I think she does probably genuinely love this song. Like, I get that the staging of the video is intentional, to make them seem like a relatable married couple in love and not a platinum-selling artist singing to his movie star wife, but it works on me. I hope he’s been fighting off Scientology goons for her all this time.

Part 2

 

[Random Internet Person]

Spoiler: Dolly Parton-"Jolene"

There’s a viral Tumblr post, pretty well-known by now, where Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” is rewritten so that Jolene is some unspeakable, Lovecraftian monstrosity who portends the apocalypse. You know it; “We cower here beneath your gaze, that sets the earth and sky ablaze, have mercy at the end of days, Jolene.” People have added what must be hundreds of verses to this, recorded their own versions; it’s one of the finer moments of Tumblr lore (at least as far as I can tell, never having used Tumblr much).

That’s a good bit, but to me this isn’t just a solid laugh; I would call it one of the most astute pieces of music criticism I’ve ever heard. It's funny because it captures something that was already there; “Jolene” basically already was a horror song. Right from the opening notes, the tone of the song is overwhelming dread -- the tense, stuttering guitar that opens it; the ghostly wail of “Joleeeeene” that closes it out. There’s something very dark and chilling and Southern Gothic about it, something eldritch in its construction, that makes it sound like it’s about something much more serious than a jealous wife and an infidelity that hasn’t even happened yet. You half expect the song to end in murder.

With Dolly having basically ascended to modern sainthood, it’s interesting to look through that lens back at “Jolene,” her most iconic hit. It’s kind of an odd pick to become Dolly’s signature song. It’s too good not to be, obviously, but it’s easy to argue that one of her other hits should hold that spot, are more important to Dolly or fit her better; “I Will Always Love You” is integral to her life story, and “Nine to Five” cemented Dolly as “Dolly!” “Jolene,” meanwhile, was early in her career – it wasn't quite her first country hit, it was her first crossover to the pop charts – and Dolly hadn’t become the icon we know and love yet. In the clip above, you can see the young Dolly being introduced by her mentor/Svengali Porter Wagoner; his tone is almost condescending, and Dolly (though already wearing her trademark big hair and makeup) seems humble and even nervous. Her relationship with Porter is music legend at this point, but it’s still jarring to see. Music biopics like to show the Year One early days before the future legend finds their footing (see Bohemian Rhapsody where Freddie fumbles with the mic stand in his first time on stage). Hollywood cliché bullshit? I always thought so, but you can see it happening in real life, in that clip of “Jolene.”

An insecure Dolly sings that song above, just like an insecure Dolly wrote it (according to legend it was inspired by a bank clerk flirting with her husband). Around the time she released “Jolene,” Dolly broke free of Porter’s control, and then a few years later moved from Nashville to L.A. to realize her ambitions. (“Here You Come Again,” the song that announced the new Dolly and her very most sellout track, is my favorite of hers.) But before all that she wrote “Jolene,” and the writer of that song is no movie star. That woman isn’t just jealous of Jolene, isn’t just scared of losing her man – she’s absolutely wrecked by her powerlessness. She is sick with horror at this woman – described indeed like an all-powerful goddess, who has already woven her spell and bewitched her husband – and how easily she could destroy her marriage and her life. Of course Jolene is all-powerful; why else would Dolly be going to her to try and save her marriage rather than her husband? “My happiness depends on you”?? Good god. That was fifty years ago, and Dolly has sung this song over and over in the decades since, even though she spent the intervening years becoming the kind of larger-than-life sex bomb that could steal a man, not lose one. (Her first country hit, "Coat of Many Colors," is even more humble, and it's honestly shocking to compare the Dolly that sings it to the Dolly she became.)

There’s another piece of Internet lore that’s sprung up around “Jolene”: the alternate interpretation that Dolly is attracted to Jolene herself, and maybe even imagining her husband’s attraction, projecting her own onto her husband. That’s certainly not the intended subtext of the song, but it’s a valid reading; Dolly’s descriptions are… a lot. (“Your voice is soft like summer rain”?) And yeah, this could be some sublimated gay yearning, or for that matter many other displaced emotions; “Jolene”’s intensity can be extrapolated into a lot of places. Here’s one I came up with on my own. I don’t know if anyone has made this observation, but have you ever noticed there is no indication whatsoever that Jolene has any intentions on Dolly’s man? Or even knows who either of them are? For all we know, Jolene is just at the grocery store minding her own business, and then this weeping wife comes out of nowhere to confront her. I like to imagine a confused Jolene saying, “He talks about me in his sleep? …I’m sorry, who is this again? Have I met him? Who are you?” (I made this joke on Twitter, and a couple sex workers said they’ve gotten this kind of email from wives of their OnlyFans subscribers.)

Yeah, yeah, I realize that you have to play along with country music. “Before He Cheats” requires you to believe that Carrie’s boyfriend is in fact cheating on her, Morgan Wallen’s “Thinking About Me” is him taunting his ex that she still thinks about him and you have to just accept that he’s not completely imagining it. I’ve never bought either song, but honestly, I think that’s on me, I’m a snarky asshole and these things are funny to me. I like my interpretation of “Jolene” though. Again, the narrator of “Jolene” is just emotionally wrecked on all levels, with jealousy, with despair; there’s no reason to think that paranoia isn’t in the mix also.

Dolly looks and dresses the way she does because – this is one of many stories she’s told over and over – when she was young she saw a woman described by the respectable people of town as the local tramp, and she thought this trashy woman wearing too much makeup was the most beautiful she’d ever seen and wanted to emulate her. Is that also the woman she thought about when she wrote Jolene? I think it probably was. Dolly clearly has thought a lot about femininity – that’s probably why this song is addressed woman to woman rather than Dolly talking to her man. Jolene sounds so much like the larger-than-life figure she aspired to be and eventually became, and yet for all that Dolly has achieved – an instantly recognizable icon, a movie star with her own theme park, a charitable saint seemingly beloved by all – her image remains humble and down to Earth. But there’s obviously a difference. When she says she hopes you like this next song, everyone knows she doesn’t actually have to hope for that. Once upon a time she meant it. Once upon a time she had to beg strange women not to destroy her family. And look what she became. Truly, Jolene is an inspiration to us all. All hail Jolene.

Part 3

 

[Random Internet Person]

Spoiler: Eminem ft. Rhianna-"The Monster"

A fact I read that blew my mind is that Eminem is the top selling rapper of the 2010s. Not the 2000s (though he was the top selling rapper of that decade too, and in fact top selling artist of any genre); the 2010s? Really? Surely it must be someone more relevant, Kanye, Kendrick, Nicki, somebody. I double-checked and different sites count it differently; in this one, Em falls well behind Drake, which makes way more sense, but even in that list he’s still in the top ten artists of the decade.

This is only confusing in hindsight, after history has judged his late catalog to be screamingly inessential. Hip-hop has been around long enough to undergo a full classic-rock-ifation, with its idols like Biggie and Pac and Wu-Tang over-mythologized and preserved in amber; it’s only fitting that Eminem, the “Elvis of rap,” should be a main beneficiary, racking up hits long after his sell-by date like the Stones in the ‘80s. But that’s the hindsight speaking again. At the start of the decade, with Recovery and The Marshall Mathers LP 2, it seemed that Eminem had finally come back after years in the wilderness. I was skeptical on Recovery but I had fully bought into MMLP2, which seemed to me like a legitimate return to form.

I’m not sure I would say it holds up anymore. It has its highlights but the hallmarks of Late Shady still plague them; “Rhyme or Reason” still strikes me as one of his best of his later career but also has that cringy Yoda impression; “Berzerk” I loved as a throwback, and still feel the urge to listen to at times, but I have to forgive some really painful shit like “Been public enemy since you thought PE was gym, bitch.” Meanwhile, I never liked its best-remembered song “Rap God,” I thought it empty flash with a lot of terrible lines (“who thinks their arms are long enough to slap box, slap box”?)/

And then… then there’s “The Monster.”

“The Monster” was the biggest hit by far from that album, and yet one that I don’t remember anyone talking about. I think the impression was that this was “the single,” just there to get radio play, with the big dumb hook from Rihanna during her six-year period of total omnipresence. It’s certainly a very catchy hook, and makes for a very listenable experience but I think most people thought of it as slight and unmemorable. It both astonishes me and doesn’t at all surprise me to learn that it was originally a song by Bebe Rexha, who I’ve always thought of as one of the least talented or interesting of her generation of pop stars. During a low point in her career, she came up with the song as a way to make sense of her depression; perennially almost-famous Jon Bellion wrote the hook.

Rexha’s version is kind of a mess, skittering and stuttering everywhere, but there’s life to it. In another’s hands (particularly Skylar Gray, consistently one of Em’s worst collaborators), this could have been bad, overwrought emo poetry. In the hands of producer Frequency, it becomes energetic and vibrant. If the song has any true claim to greatness, it’s in the beat, the drums, the guitar; it gives the song more propulsion than it maybe deserves.

Or maybe you can make a case that the song is great as a whole. That isn’t an idea I would have given any consideration to at the time; I don’t know that I gave this song a second thought in 2013 no matter the hundreds of times I heard it. The original song is vague about what the monster is; it’s free to be whatever you want it to be, and Eminem decided the monster was fame. Much like B.o.B.’s “Airplanes” and Jay-Z’s “Holy Grail,” this to me seemed like a rapper presented with a hook too heavy to find a proper topic for, and having to default to the pressures of stardom, a navel-gazing proposition for sure. I couldn’t think of something I wanted Eminem to rap about less than fame, a topic he’d already drilled to death on The Marshall Mathers LP 1.I brushed it off without a thought.

But in the years since I’ve thought about this song a lot. I’m embarrassed to say that Em’s thoughts mirror my own feelings about life as a minor Internet quasi-celebrity, even though I’m exponentially below the level of fame Marshall is singing about (below the level of even other e-celebrities, for that matter). “The Monster” is a self-indulgent song (Eminem spends the music video recreating past glories like “Lose Yourself” and “The Way I Am”), and me saying I relate to it is one of the most self-indulgent things I’ve ever written. To be sure, there’s a lot in there I don’t relate to, like the stuff about the pressure of greatness; Marshall is rapping about a drive for success and respect that I’ve never even aspired to, let alone attained. But the ambivalence, man, I get it. The desire to have your cake and eat it too, the mixed emotions about whether it was worth it, most especially the unsure response to gratitude from fans (“I ain’t here to save the fuckin’ children,” he raps, sounding almost bewildered).

But I’ll spare you. The reason that fame sucks is also the reason that songs about fame tend to suck: Almost nobody could relate or care. Em seems to realize this and pivots away to end on a triumphant note. In between, “The Monster” goes some wacky places: A yodeling break; a simultaneously rapped-and-sung opening to the second verse; an odd reference to Intervention host Jeff VanVonderen, a person I’ve never heard of except for in this song. (Because of this song, I have never heard Russell Wilson’s name without wanting to shout “Russell Wilson in a haystack!!” even though that’s not even how the lyrics go.) When he gets to the end, he tries to conclude that while he’s here on Earth, he’s going to continue being the greatest rapper alive. (Tragically, this did not happen.) When he gets to the line about not trying to save the children, he also adds “But if one kid in a hundred million who are going through a struggle feels it and relates, that's great.” And also “maybe I’m nuts for real, but I’m okay with that.”

I’m not sure I buy it. There’s an awkward pause in the way he says “That’s… great,” and an ugly snarl in the way he says “I’m okay with that.” It’s a weak and unconvincing conclusion for a guy who, in hindsight, still hadn’t really regained his confidence, and I think that more than anything is why “The Monster” is not remembered as a great song. Still, there’s something about it that hits a nerve for me, something far more than “Holy Grail” or “Airplanes,” two songs by rappers who did not at all seem weighed down by anxiety. Other monsters (corniness, age) took him down, but “The Monster,” though not necessarily a triumph, may well be the last honest or interesting song he ever made.

Part 4

 

[Random Internet Person]

Spoiler: David Bowie-"Ziggy Stardust"

If you want to get to know me, here’s a factoid that’s probably helpful: The riff from “Ziggy Stardust” is basically always playing in my head. If I sit down at my piano, there’s a decent chance that it’s the first thing that comes out of my hands. It’s such a perfectly circular riff; I don’t know what I mean by that but that’s the shape it feels like when I play it. Honestly I think it’s the greatest riff of all time; Suck it, “Satisfaction,” eat shit “Smoke on the Water.” WHOMMMMM. DA-NA-NA-NA-NA NA, DAHHH. Stately elegant, but powerful, a herald’s fanfare announcing that the king is about to enter, and then Bowie shouts “oh!” and the beat kicks in. God, is there a single better opening to a song.

I don’t know what it says about me that “Ziggy Stardust” is my favorite Bowie song. I took an informal poll on Twitter a while back asking people what their favorite Bowie was, and I didn’t see “Ziggy Stardust” come up that often; for some reason it doesn’t seem to be the front-of-mind Bowie song for very many people. Don’t get me wrong, it’s way up there, just not first in line apparently. I can tell you that it’s not the first Bowie song I ever loved; that’s “Rebel Rebel” (the second greatest riff of all time). It’s not Bowie’s most beloved song – at this point that would probably be “Heroes,” not a major hit in its day but proven by time to be his most emotionally powerful track. It’s not his signature song – it might have a claim on it if not for “Space Oddity,” which established Bowie’s persona early and for all time, and for “Starman,” which makes more sense than “Ziggy” out of context of the Ziggy Stardust album, and was the only record’s only single. (Bizarre to think of “Suffragette City” and “Moonage Daydream” as deep cuts.) It’s not his biggest hit – Bowie had two U.S. #1s, “Fame” and “Let’s Dance,” top-tier Bowie songs to be sure, but not ones that mean nearly as much to me. (“Ziggy Stardust” was only eventually, in the ‘90s, released as a single as a live version, and it only reached #76 on the UK charts.)

What “Ziggy Stardust” is, though, is probably the Bowie-est Bowie song of all time. In the same way that most rap songs are uncoverable because they’re too tied to its artist, “Ziggy Stardust” just seems like it should not be done by anyone else. “Starman” is at least open to interpretation, but “Ziggy Stardust” is a song by Bowie, about Bowie, completely inextricable from the legend of Bowie. Yes yes, I know I’m exaggerating, that’s not literally true for a number of reasons – several acts, including Bauhaus, have done solid covers, and “Ziggy Stardust” is not actually literally about the man David Bowie. It’s about Ziggy Stardust, a character who is only one of Bowie’s many personas (albeit the most famous) and it’s sung from the point of view of one of Ziggy’s sidemen, not Ziggy himself. Even if we take Ziggy and Bowie as functionally the same person, a person singing “Ziggy Stardust” would then just be paying tribute to the superstar Bowie, the same way everyone has for decades.

And yet it just feels wrong. Even footage of later Bowie performing the song live -- without makeup, not in character --- feels wrong. “Ziggy Stardust” is a tribute to the late rock star, who has saved the Earth and returned to his home planet or something (I honestly never followed or particularly cared about the album’s plotline). In it, Ziggy is described as basically the greatest motherfucking rock & roller who ever fucking lived. He really sang, and boy could he play guitar. He was the leper messiah who made love with his ego. The narrator manages to separately compliment both his dick and his ass. It seems like the only person who could possibly pay proper tribute to the man is Ziggy Stardust himself.

Long before I knew Bowie as an artist, I knew him as an idea. He was, in my early college years, the consensus pick for the greatest rock star who had ever lived, at least among my group of friends. We were all nerds of course, and many of the people I knew were LGBT, so Bowie’s gender-bending queerness and heady thinky lyrics about identity and outer-space got everyone’s respect. But he also had fucking jams, he rocked as hard as anyone has ever rocked – it’s difficult to imagine a person who likes your more mainstream, Midwest-friendly rock anthems like “Sweet Emotion” or “Rock and Roll All Nite” but can’t get into at least one Bowie song. I knew plenty of people who were fans of the man even though I suspected they did not know his music. (I do not remember ever demanding that an alleged fan prove it by naming five Bowie songs, but I cannot promise that it never happened.) To me, “Ziggy Stardust” is the quintessential Bowie song for exactly that reason; Bowie wasn’t just cool for coolness’s sake but it is the first thing to know about him, and “Ziggy Stardust” explains why.

It’s remarkable because by the time I reached adulthood, the pompous self-mythologization of “Ziggy Stardust” should not have been cool at all. Bowie’s arrival is sometimes seen as the end of the ‘60s, but Ziggy the character is conceived as the ultimate ‘60s rock star. He was a legend in his own time, he knew it and acted like it, he died young. There are elements of Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, and worst of all Jim Morrison, the ultimate ‘60s legend made embarrassing by time, strutting around in his leather pants convinced of his own charisma. (I still like The Doors but I do get why their cred has dimmed with time.) By the ‘90s, and certainly in the age of poptimism, the sex-drugs-and-rock-&-roll mythos of the Boomer generation was discredited if not outright obnoxious. The lyrics describe him in all the same way as the tedious cock rockers the ‘90s banished, with his giant ego, giant dick and incredible guitar-playing – imagine trying to make this guy cool in the guitar-theatrics-unfriendly present day. Not to mention it’s pretentious -- he was the greatest rock star ever and also he was an alien and he saved the world! What are we, thirteen? I can honestly imagine an alternate ‘90s where Bowie, or at least this phase of his, was passe.

That of course did not happen – even during the awkward Tin Machine years, Bowie was revered as something like the godfather of alt-rock, getting a key endorsement by Kurt Cobain and then a collaboration with Trent Reznor. By the early 2000s the nerd-beloved cartoon “The Venture Bros.” had made him an actual character on the show – the head of the supervillain cabal The Guild of Calamitous Intent! – which only reflected how beloved he was by that point. As the rock & roll era ended and poptimism took over, Bowie's plasticity and over-the-top image made him exactly as revered. His artsy experiments and eclectic versatility kept from him aging badly, I think, but also the music was simply too good. When the man died, I naturally reached for “Ziggy Stardust” and I probably would have even if it were not my favorite of his songs – the man had anticipated it, he had already written his perfect eulogy. Really, who else could have? Ohhhhhhhhh yeahhhhh, Ziggy played guitaaaaaaar.

Spoiler: Imagine Dragons-"Follow You"

I had a surprising revelation last year that I was actually rooting for Imagine Dragons. I’m hardly alone in this – backlashes often get backlashes of their own, so at some point Dan Reynolds’s beleaguered band began garnering apologists for their bombastic millennial arena rock. I’m not one of them, I still dislike most of their songs (especially their biggest ones). But I dislike that I dislike them; I’d love for them to prove me wrong and shut me up, even though I’ve been a hater for a very long time now (one of the few things I was ahead of the curve on). It sucks for me because I was also an early booster; as far back as their third single I began to realize that this band might be Bad Actually, an impression that only got worse over the years. “Thunder” has become the popular shorthand for their shittiness, but for me the real killer was the Of Monsters and Men-ish indie single “I Bet My Life.” People who aren’t me tend to be fond of that one, but Reynolds’s passionate screaming of such a banal, empty chorus permanently ended any warm feelings I might have had from those early songs.

Their bad reputation is kind of glanced at in the self-deprecating video for their newest single, “Follow You.” Kaitlin Olson presents her husband Rob McElhenney with a birthday present of a private concert, despite the fact that she and not he is the Imagine Dragons fan. She swoons over the band and pictures the entire band flexing and preening and making bedroom eyes at her; it’s intentionally ridiculous, an attempt to make the band seem less pompous. Your mileage may vary on whether it succeeds.

But why do they even have to do that? Did they ever deserve the shit they got? It just plain feels bad to hate on Imagine Dragons, a lot more than it does to hate other overplayed mainstream bands like Nickelback or Maroon 5. Unlike Adam Levine, you could never claim that Reynolds and co. are indifferent to the craft; they’re trying, they’re trying very hard, they’re clearly still passionate about their art. Also, Dan Reynolds seems like a well-meaning guy who’s supportive of all the right causes, vs. Chad Kroeger who it’s hard not to suspect is a giant asshole. Reynolds wears his heart on his sleeve and he’s openly hurt by his band’s uncoolness, despite the fact that he is, from a purely numerical standpoint, one of the most popular singers alive. “Believer” and “Thunder” both have nearly two billion streams on Spotify, but their silent-majority constituency doesn’t seem to alleviate the pain of their lack of cred. Somehow, this multi-platinum band has become the underdog.

It’s hard to feel bad for a band for being popular, but money doesn’t always buy you respect. Even many haters still say their first album Night Visions was pretty good; a friend of mine called it the Hysteria of the streaming era, a perfectly polished packed-with-hits encapsulation of a moment in time, destined to be popular with the masses but sneered at by the critics. I don’t love that album (I don’t love Hysteria either), but it’s a dead-on comparison. The rise of poptimism has done very little for the appreciation of mainstream rock; perhaps Imagine Dragons were always doomed to be underestimated. So, yes, naturally, there’s a wave of sympathy and apologism for them. Sure, the chipmunk voices in “Thunder” are annoying. And okay, maybe the empty grandiosity of “Believer” grates after the 100th listen. Are these terrible crimes? They’ve never hurt anyone, done or said anything offensive except to the aesthetic standards of a bunch of snobs. They’re only victims of their own success, and they also have a number of deeper cuts that hold up pretty well. Why would you want to make a man as earnest as Dan Reynolds feel bad about himself? Last year, prior to their recent return to the charts, I decided that I was going to be a lot kinder to Imagine Dragons.

“Follow You,” the newest Imagine Dragons hit, is so fucking bad I’m just awestruck by it. It is, and I do not say this lightly, the worst song they’ve ever released, worse than “Thunder” and “Believer,” which are awful, but which I at least understood what they were going for. Nothing about “Follow You” works in the slightest; it’s a hideous malformed mess, and yet somehow not in any way that makes it interesting. Most of my Twitter follows insisted that the bad one was “Cutthroat,” released with “Follow You” simultaneously. “Cutthroat” is also probably not a good song; it’s the band at their most overwrought, and they were not exactly a restrained act on a good day. But at least Reynolds’s over-the-top screaming is backed with an actual topic that justifies it; it’s a direct challenge to the critics, a statement that in the battle between the band and its haters it will be Imagine Dragons who will come out victorious. “My money’s good and I came to win,” he sings, a ludicrous flex from a band who has no business doing any such thing. It’s not good, but it is a raw, naked, bleeding performance; Reynolds has revealed far too much of his insecurities on it, and it’s hard for me to not be fascinated.

“Follow You” is just a love song, written by Reynolds for his wife. It goes, “I will follow you way down, wherever you may go”. These are lyrics for a B-minus-tier VH1 band from the early ‘00s, like Lifehouse or The Calling, not A-listers like Imagine Dragons; I can’t say I’m interested much. But top 40 bands have been writing dippy, uninspired love songs for ages; the worst it should be is boring. But boring it is not; it’s far too strikingly inept for that. The mechanics of the romantic ballad have completely and totally defeated the band here, they don’t understand love songs, have no idea how to approach them, completely and utterly fail to adapt their sound to it. They wail and stomp all over it, not once figuring out how their aesthetic of booming grandiose movie-trailer music could apply to romantic devotion. The entire band stops so that several layers of Dan Reynoldses can scream “I KNOW THAT IT’S NOT RIGHT!!!!” How is his wife supposed to feel listening to that except terrified?

For a band driven by atmospheric synths, Imagine Dragons is terrifyingly loud. I’ve heard them called Coldplay ripoffs but Coldplay were a space-y, inward-looking band, very much unlike ID. Naturally, “Follow You” sounds only like a horrorshow. It’s a song of devotion presented with not a single drop of warmth. What the fuck is this?

The worst part comes near the end, where Reynolds starts going “doo-ba-doo-ba-doo-ba-doo-ba” or something like that for no adequately discernible reason. It sounds like doo-wop syllables but jammed into a song light years removed from doo-wop’s smoothness and cool. It’s the dumbest fucking sound in history, or at least the worst music moment of the year so far. I honestly do not understand the artist who thinks that any of this is a good idea, or enjoys making it.

“Follow You” is not doing amazingly right now, at least compared to other Imagine Dragons singles, but it’s holding in there. It may yet become a genuine hit, as per the band’s terrible ability to make the most obnoxious music hits – they have a way of finding hooks and making swerves in their song that make them stick in the brain, no matter how obnoxious; they’re the Black-Eyed Peas of pompous alt-rock. I still do feel like an insufferable snob dunking on them, but I am pretty out of patience here. At some point harmlessness is no longer an excuse, and just in general I’m sick of being kind to things out of contrarianism. Twilight still sucks, Justin Bieber still sucks, James Cameron’s Avatar still sucks, Imagine Dragons fucking sucks, I’m out.

…“Walking the Wire” is pretty good though.

Spoiler: Barry Manilow-CopaCabana

BARRY MANILOW - Copacabana

Liza Minnelli once performed “Copacabana” on an episode of “The Muppet Show.” The pairing is almost too perfect; Liza, like Lola, was a woman out of time. Eternally linked to the Hollywood Golden Age via her mother Judy Garland who she greatly resembled, she found her calling in showtunes and gaudy stage and screen musicals, during a time when both theater and film were shedding the glitz of Old Hollywood. Her biggest role was in 1972’s “Cabaret,” a movie about another classic form of theater violently ending. All this made her an apt choice to play not just Lola the ‘40s showgirl, but also Lola the aged ‘70s washout, wearing the wrong clothes in the wrong time period, ruined by tragedy.

I first heard “Copacabana” while watching a rerun of that “Muppet Show” episode, and it fucked my shit up. I would have been around six years old, before I had developed any understanding of camp or irony. The episode itself is odd and experimental, with Liza playing herself playing an actress playing Lola, but the layers of meta-fiction, the campiness of the song, the fact that Rico and Tony were played by giant furry monsters – none of this did anything to dilute the horror of the song. It wasn’t Tony’s murder that got to me either; it was Lola’s sad afterlife as a confused damaged old woman, her love and youth and sanity long stolen from her by Rico’s fatal bullet, by the cruel passage of time, and of course by Tony’s real killer.

His name was Barry; he was a showman. Maybe one of the greatest of all time, had he performed in a different genre or a different age. He was not as much an anachronism as Liza, the ‘70s soft rock boom was very good to him, but his style hearkens back to an older era of pop. Compared to Elton John or even late-period Neil Diamond, he had no edge or even a whiff of “authenticity,” whatever that is; his stock and trade was schmaltz, corny sincerity delivered with gusto, and it made him a punchline for many decades. But though he made his name off of soppy ballads, the song he’s best remembered for is “Copacabana,” an extremely atypical track in his catalog and just a weird ridiculous song in its own right.

“Copacabana” was originally intended as a work of nostalgia, of the post-war era when South America was the height of trendiness (being the only place on Earth not blown to shit during WWII). Havana was a glamorous tourist hotspot rather than a Commie Threat to America; nightclubs like the Copacabana (a real place, if you don’t know) played the hottest songs from Brazil and Latin America. Manilow had already written a nostalgia song, “Bandstand Boogie,” an unironic tribute to ‘50s innocence; there was no reason why “Copacabana” couldn’t also have been a straightforward celebration of ‘40s glamour. And yet for some reason Manilow’s songwriting took a darker turn.

I don’t know why Manilow decided Tony had to die. Perhaps he associates that whole scene with old movie melodramas; he even includes a non-visual version of that old trope where two people wrestle over a pistol and there’s a mystery gunshot and a long pause while we wait to find out which one got shot. But what gets me is that the chorus has barely anything to do with Lola and her loss. The title of the song is “Copacabana,” not “Lola,” and Manilow belts out the thrill of the club (The music! The passion!) completely unconcerned with Lola watching the love of her life bleed out on the floor. Barry was a divorced man; he ended his marriage to pursue a career in show business, and succeeded. Perhaps the song is subtextually biographical; what is “Copacabana” but the triumph of show business over love? Tony is long dead but the Copacabana still stands, which is all that Barry cares about, and perhaps all that Lola cares about at this point too. The song is soaked with irony but it’s all in the text, not the performance; Barry doesn’t seem like he’s being sarcastic. He’s Barry f’ing Manilow, after all; he couldn’t sing it any other way.

But Barry probably understands the darkness of his song better than he lets on. I don’t know if it’s an official music video but there is a performance video on YouTube (linked above). In the video, after Barry finishes the final verse, he finds a female dance partner and they close out the song by sambaing through the outro, which strikes me as a fairly callous response to the tragedy he just sang about. The big that’s-entertainment grin never leaves his face even when he sings about Lola losing her mind; it comes off as demonic. It’s dark camp; the story becomes serious because Barry isn’t taking it seriously. In 2014 Barry quietly married his male manager after forty years in the closet; I’m hardly versed in the subject but I suspect there’s a strong queer-theory reading in the sheer malevolence with which Manilow tears this boy and girl apart. There’s also a TV-movie adaptation of the song where Barry, in his only acting role, plays Tony (Annette O’Toole, no Liza, plays Lola). I haven’t seen it but I can’t imagine it’s any good. Slight, elfin Barry can’t be Tony; he can only be the cruel omniscient narrator, the grinning emcee of the program (shadows of “Cabaret” again).

Thirty years pass within the lyrics of the song; more than that has passed in the real world since it was released. The rhythms of Latin jazz found a welcoming home in disco; the two genres have more in common at this point than differences, they’re both firmly a part of a distant past, they have all the same associations of glamour and crime. And yet when Barry reveals that the Copacabana is now a discotheque and a brief moment of thumping bass interrupts the track, it feels like the most shocking and unwelcome of intrusions. “But that was thirty years ago” is such a jarring time jump, it was jarring to me as a kid and it’s even more jarring now as I get older and more haunted by lost years. Barry sings “Don’t fall in love,” the hook resolves into a minor key, the singers hauntingly intone “Copacabanaaaa” and Barry smirks at the audience. Lola remains trapped in the past, trying to relieve an era when music and passion were always the fashion, even though that same era brought her nothing but misery. Nostalgia is poison, folks, and don’t you forget it.

Spoiler: Jonathan Coulton-"Code Monkey"

One of Weird Al Yankovic’s late-career masterpieces is “Skipper Dan,” a power-pop portrait of a once-promising acting prodigy reduced to telling bad jokes as a guide for a chintzy theme park attraction. Since most of Al’s originals are homages to other artists, people immediately started guessing which act it was based off of; Weezer and Fountains of Wayne were the most common guesses. Both made sense; the riff is very similar to Weezer’s “Pork and Beans,” the lyrics remind of Fountains of Wayne’s many character portraits like “Bright Future in Sales.” But for me, the inspiration was obvious: It was Jonathan Coulton. “Skipper Dan” is an extremely atypical song for Al, funny but not funny-haha, honestly pretty sad, very much like Coulton’s many songs about people in comedically depressing situations. Al said he actually hadn’t intended it to sound like Coulton but he hears the similarities; Coulton joked on Twitter that no, he was the one who sounded like Al all these years.

That’s nice of him to say but Coulton doesn’t sound a thing like Weird Al to me. Weird Al is a product of MTV: He’s loud and colorful, and his humor is broad and corny in a way that has kind of rendered him impervious to aging; he’ll always speak directly to your inner 12-year-old. Coulton, meanwhile, is a product of the Internet; he quit his job to pursue music because he was inspired by the power of the Web 1.0 to directly communicate with his fans. Coulton’s most popular songs were written in the mid-‘00s and reflect the Internet’s obsessions at the time: monkeys, zombies, robots. He’s irrevocably tied to that moment in time in geek culture, and boy has geek culture taken on a different light since then.

I remember Coulton saying that he’s expressing his own issues and emotions through strange avenues: the lonely giant squid of “I Crush Everything,” the mad scientist haplessly trying to woo his terrified captive in “Skullcrusher Mountain.” “Code Monkey,” his most popular song after “Still Alive” (on Spotify, at least) is like those, but its story is much more mundane. No scifi apocalypses in this one; just one unhappy white-collar drone in a dead-end job. A “code monkey,” Wikipedia helpfully explains to me, is a coder who’s not involved with any actual design work. His job is purely functional, the menial labor of programming. The only actual joke in the song is that Code Monkey speaks in broken Tarzan-style syntax (he might literally be a monkey). On Genius.com, someone smartly pointed out that the lyrics also resemble programming code - >Code Monkey goto: job. So a code monkey twice over – it’s clever!

But “Code Monkey” isn’t really the fun or funny kind of clever; it’s too sincere and sad for that. Certainly Coulton’s nerd audience ate it up and related to it, but the titular Code Monkey is more than a nerd; he’s a loser. We gather he’s probably still youngish, in his twenties, but also old enough where he seems to be worrying that loserdom isn’t a phase he'll grow out of. His shitty boring low-respect job is sucking away his soul. It’s pretty nakedly personal for Coulton, who himself was a programmer before pursuing music. But the most revealing verse is the second one, where Code Monkey clumsily milady’s at the receptionist and gets lightly but firmly brushed off. It’s brutal cringe comedy sketched out with impressive economy. His flirting technique is giving awkward compliments and offering to do minor errands for her; it’s just the most humiliating beta shit, and in one line we can tell that the secretary sees right through it and is uncomfortable and is trying to shut it down as quickly as she can. It raises uncomfortable questions about what kind of person Code Monkey is exactly.

I don’t know if “Nice Guy” had entered the Internet lexicon yet in 2005 but Code Monkey seems like a textbook example. If you don’t know the term, “nice guy” in quotes generally means a guy who thinks of himself as a good person but is not actually all that impressive and is secretly driven by resentment that niceness hasn’t gotten him all the things he wants (especially in the romance department). When Code Monkey says he has “warm fuzzy secret heart,” it’s hard to take it at face value; the Code Monkey we meet is not warm and fuzzy, he’s bitter and frustrated and lonely and sad. Even the fan animation above has Code Monkey not as a cute chimp but as an angry feces-throwing animal. The character we hear about doesn’t seem to have any interesting traits (“Code Monkey like Fritos”), he has desires but no goals or ambitions, he doesn’t seem particularly fun to be around, from what we hear he’s not even a very good code monkey. I did not discover JoCo until relatively recently, and to me “Code Monkey” sounds like an artifact of a much different time in geekdom, when Joss Whedon and Kevin Smith were unironically revered and when nerd culture could still think of itself as the champion of the underdog. The archetype of the sexually frustrated computer nerd is a lot less sympathetic these days, to put it mildly. In fairness, there’s nothing concrete in the song to show that Code Monkey is an incel-in-training; it was just easy to assume the best about this character in 2005, and now in 2020 it’s easy to assume the worst.

This is not to say that I think “Code Monkey” has become a bad song; I think it’s his best song. “High Fidelity” is also still one of my favorite movies; I had someone tell me that that movie is bad actually because John Cusack’s character is a selfish unlikable douche. My response to that is also my response to my own criticisms of Code Monkey: No shit. I know Code Monkey is unpleasantly self-pitying and basic; the song’s appeal depends on it. It also helps that on a musical level, “Code Monkey” fuckin’ rips, and when that chorus kicks in it’s hard not to relate to the monkey’s wounded pride. I’m pretty sure the song is self-aware; the maiin character is depicted as a dumb animal for a reason. Code Monkey’s frustrated with himself and his own limitations; I know he wishes he had something more to say for himself than liking Mountain Dew and naps. But that’s what he’s got and he can’t pretend to be what he isn’t.

It’s probably not cool, for many reasons, to say that I still relate to “Code Monkey” but I do. I’ve had dull office jobs with no future that I wasn’t very good at. I’m well past that now, my job actually is “fulfilling in creative way” and I have no “boring manager Rob” to report to, just myself. But this job can feel just as pointless and dead-end as any other; when I sit down at the old content mill to write my episodes, I still wind up singing this to myself. (Review monkey like Fritos.) There’s a sad little code monkey in all of us, after all; “Code Monkey” may have aged strangely but my heart breaks for him and his stupid doomed crush. Tell Code Monkey he has many advantages and privileges and that he needs to examine his own decisions in life and that his story has been told too often, sure. But if he’s not as sympathetic to the world anymore, doesn’t that make his life all the sadder?

Spoiler: Corey Hart-"Sunglasses At Night"

It’s time to say it: “Sunglasses at Night” is a great song, and wearing your sunglasses at night is super-cool.

This song *is* the ‘80s. You don’t even need to know what it’s about. You just need to hear the title lyric, or even just picture the image: a guy wearing his sunglasses in the dark. It’s a picture of ‘80s cool perfectly of its time, so badass in context and irrevocably dated and lame outside it. A billion pictures pop up in the brain when it comes on: The young Tom Cruise, about to become a superstar, flashing his big yuppie grin under his Wayfarers; The Terminator in his leather jacket, shades covering up his exposed robot eye; ZZ Top cruising down the boulevard at night in their Eliminator hot rod. But you can imagine these things out of the context of the mid-80s; not so of “Sunglasses at Night.” I don’t know if anything could ever capture 1984 as well, not just because of the very specific era of style it evokes, but also because it takes it to its most illogical, impractical extreme. Corey Hart is so devoted to his killer fashion he keeps those damn sunglasses on even when there’s no sun to shield his eyes from. It’s ridiculous. How does he cross the street?

But Corey Hart didn’t write this song to be a fashion statement, or at least not only that. It’s also the idea that his shades at night make him invisible, impervious to the last bits of light that might enter his vision. Wearing sunglasses at night allows him to “watch you weave and breathe your story lines” and “keep track of the vision in [his] eyes.” The cover of darkness, inside and out, gives him the ability to observe the truth of his lover’s deceptions and the clarity to understand it. The sunglasses don’t prevent him from seeing, they prevent the world from seeing *him*. The eyes are the window to the soul, after all, so naturally the shades keep his soul hidden, the nighttime doubly so. It’s as powerful on a metaphorical level as it is laughable when taken literally. As you can imagine this is an attractive vision to me, Todd, the guy whose gimmick is being continually hidden in shadow. I love it, honestly; I value my privacy a lot, all the more so since I became a semi-public figure, and I just love the idea that I could carry my shadows around with me outside of my videos, just by putting on my shades. So cool! Corey Hart has superpowers, basically. Corey Hart is the night.

The synth riff to “Sunglasses at Night” an unmistakable ripoff of The Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This.” Where it differs is that the Eurythmics’ synths remain cold and foreboding for the length of the song; the song gets more urgent in the bridge but it never becomes warm. What “Sweet Dreams” is about is up for interpretation but it definitely isn’t about love. If there’s anything about relationships in Annie Lennox’s lyrics it’s sociopathic exploitation. “Sunglasses at Night,” meanwhile, is at its core a breakup song; his girl has done him wrong. The shades come off; the song kicks into his life. “Don’t switch the blade on the guy in shades, oh no!!” he screams. Oh no indeed.

Again: ridiculous. The sunglasses are part of his identity now, he’s “the man in shades.” His lover’s betrayal is described with a metaphor of violence. It’s romantic strife rendered as a Batman panel, completely unironically, and backdropped with a rippin’ guitar solo while Corey Hart bobs his head and makes an intense, constipated face. I made a comment in a previous episode that The Lame ‘70s have entirely faded from memory, but I notice now that the The Lame ‘80s are still here. Someone on Twitter speculated that it’s because what was stupid about the ‘80s and what was great about it are actually pretty similar. (Definitely not true of the ‘70s.) “Sunglasses at Night” is dated kitsch, and that’s how it’s remembered, and yet it hits me all the same. Black leather and dark shades, effortlessly cool, completely unaware of how embarrassing it is. You got it made with the guy in shades, oh no. Rating: 8 out of 10

Spoiler: I also stumbled on this article talking about his James Somerton video.

Anyway. So you guys may or may not know by now, but I just released my most successful video ever. I hadn't yet put it up in here, because it’s so out of my wheelhouse. (I am working on the worst list, for the record.) You guys have been pretty understanding in general, and I did a lot of work on that video so I’m going to go ahead and charge for it. I didn’t give you guys 24 hours exclusive access like I do for my normal episodes, so if you guys think that’s out of line or you don’t feel like a video like this is something you want to pay for, I understand – please message me, and I’ll make sure you don’t get charged. To give you guys something worth your buck, though, I thought I’d share some thoughts about where my head has been at these past 12 months. I’m not sure where to start with this one, so I may as well bring it around back to where it all started: Anakin Skywalker.

Anakin Skywalker doesn’t like sand. It’s coarse, and rough, and irritating, and it gets everywhere. Also, he is haunted by the kiss that you should never have given him. His heart is beating, hoping that kiss will not become a scar. You are in his very soul, tormenting him. I have watched these scenes over and over and just laughed and laughed my ass off, but I feel like this is mostly the fault of George Lucas, an infamously bad writer of dialogue and director of actors. I don’t blame Hayden Christensen, who I think is a good actor who got ruined by Lucas and never got his real shot. I know he’s a good actor because he gave one of my favorite performances ever, as the sniveling fraud in 2003’s Shattered Glass.

I don’t think Shattered Glass was what made me want to be a reporter. I got into journalism because I had to major in something, and that was the only real path for someone who could write, but couldn’t write fiction. I can say, though, that Shattered Glass left a huge mark on my psyche. I loved that movie. I’ve watched it many times over the course of my life, including the past couple weeks. In college, and afterwards, I ended up reading all I could about Stephen Glass, the real guy it’s about, and I did my senior thesis about him. It’s one of my favorite movies – favorite stories – ever.

If you don’t know, Stephen Glass was a star reporter in the late ‘90s for venerable political mag The New Republic. (In my journalism classes I learned to write phrases like “venerable political mag.”) Glass wrote wild, offbeat articles, about topics like political novelty conventions that sold Monica Lewinsky condoms, or Wall Street workers who revered Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan like he was Springsteen. It turns out that these stories were all fake; he invented them, completely. Adam Penenberg, a writer for Forbes's online magazine, pulled the thread on just a single story of his and it all came crashing down.

Anyway, they made a movie about it, and it’s fantastic (if you like dry films about serious people talking seriously in office buildings, at least). For some reason it inspired me more than All the President’s Men or, later, Spotlight, movies where our heroic newspapermen uncover great horrible crimes. I guess you could call Shattered Glass an underdog story – the highly respected institution The New Republic, “the in-flight magazine of Air Force One,” KO’d by an Internet reporter back when online news was a joke – but embarrassing a snobby periodical is hardly toppling governments or changing the world. Penenberg himself largely disappears from the movie around the halfway point. And yet, there was something to it, something primal – not a story of reporter vs. power, but reporter vs. reporter. Mirror match, Link vs. Dark Link. The good journalist vs. the bad journalist. Truth vs. lies. Why, this was a story about the importance of journalism itself. At one point Penenberg exhaustively lists all the sources he researched trying to get to the truth, and it made me proud to be a reporter. This was a real job; this was hard, honest work I was doing.

Eventually I realized that reporting pays dick, and I wound up making jokes about Justin Bieber’s haircut on the Internet for a living instead (for a lot more money than I did when I was serving the public interest). I’m a successful critic but I’ve never considered myself a very good one – it’s never come easy to me, it’s just a job I fell into. As I write this, I’ve been trying to finish this one Nickelback episode for three months and I can’t seem to get it done (addendum: I finally finished it a couple weeks ago and I think it came out well). Focusing on work just seems harder and harder these days, and it doesn’t help that around this time last year, I had less time to focus on work, because I met someone. His name was James.

In December 2022, two of my friends (Princess Weekes and Maggie Mae Fish), got into a minor argument on Twitter with someone over the hiring practices of our sponsor/platform Nebula. That person was James Somerton, a YouTuber who had been trying to join. Both of them were very angry about his baseless accusations; I was talking about it with them, and as I go through my texts now, I see that I wrote “oh is this the plagiarist guy.” So I must have already heard about him, and the fact that there were some free-floating plagiarism accusations against him; I don’t remember when or for what though, I didn’t know anything about him and I instinctively tune out YouTuber drama. Not my business.

Other people do care about YouTuber drama though. I think it was this little flare-up that brought Somerton, and his minor controversies, to the attention of Harry “HBomberguy” Brewis. I also don’t remember when or from who I heard that HBomberguy was planning to make them his next video (I’ve met and spoken to Harry a few times but we’re not close). But I do remember thinking it was a bad look, and not a good idea. My guiding principle is that drama is bad; I’ve seen so many people caught up in an Internet firestorm who were bombarded with harassment and trolls, and the thought made me ill, even when it happened to genuinely awful people. So I didn’t think exposing other YouTubers to that was a good idea, especially when it’s a giant like Harry vs. some loser I’d never heard of. But it wasn’t really my business.

But I’m skipping ahead (maybe). One event I can definitively place in the timeline happened in January, when I heard some murmurings on Twitter about Somerton again. Somerton, who had complained that Nebula had no queer content (extremely not true), had made a video called “Why Bad Gays Are Good” that was making people upset. Curiosity got the better of me, so for the first time I watched one of his videos. It was dogshit – incoherent, thesis-less rambling, just rancid stuff – but towards the end of the video he made a truly shocking argument: all the cool gays had died during the AIDS crisis, and the unfuckable losers who remained had led the gay rights movement towards sellout assimilationist goals like marriage and military service. This was both wildly offensive and completely historically inaccurate, and I was so shocked that I broke my usual no-drama reserve and subtweeted about it. I mean, this was the guy who was arguing that Nebula should hire him so that he could make “exclusively queer content” for them! Imagine the firestorm if Nebula had hyped up their “queer content” and then published this! But I got some pushback. In response to my tweet, some of his fans got on me, and they were clearly twisting what he had very clearly said to make it sound okay. What had he done to deserve this devotion? I got curious again.

I vaguely remembered hearing someone complain about one of his other videos, that it had lacked historical rigor or something like that. I found it and left it on in the background while I websurfed; it was called “The Gay Image Body Crisis.” I didn’t necessarily like it, I was only half-paying attention to it, but it was clearly a lot better written and structured, and it included some heartbreaking personal stuff about growing up a fat kid in a world (especially a gay world) that looked down on fat people. I could see now why he had an audience; he knew how to dress and light a set, he could structure an argument, most importantly he knew how to deliver lines into a mic in an authoritative tone. I did have some issues with it, like a rambling segment about the definition of fascism that seemed unnecessary, plus there was a lot of historical stuff that didn’t have citation or seem backed up by anything, especially a part about how Nazis had invented our current standards of body fitness. By this point, talk amongst my colleagues about Somerton’s plagiarism was starting to come up more frequently, and I was curious if this one had any allegations against it, so I did some Googling about what people had said about this one video. I found a single comment on Reddit that called the entire thing bad history, which backed up my suspicion that Somerton’s conclusions were a little stretched. But it didn’t strike me as outrageously so… not until I read the part about how, counter to the claims in the video, Ernst Rohm’s murder had nothing to do with him being fat. That troubled me. I’m not up on my Nazi history, I had never even heard of Ernst Rohm, but doing just some cursory reading, I realized there was no way that Rohm was killed for being fat. The rest of the video may have had “truthiness” vibes, yeah, some unsourced analysis, sure, but this… this was something else. It was even worse than his dumb claim about who died of AIDS, which was just a wrong conclusion extrapolated from a snarky Fran Lebowitz quote. Here, Somerton had shared a fun factoid that was completely fabricated. I went back and thought harder about what I’d just watched. Did he really say poor people got fat during the Great Depression? Did he say that the Soviets weren’t attractive because they were always wearing heavy coats? What? Come to think of it, his personal stories about his weight problems also seemed wildly exaggerated for sympathy; he claimed he couldn’t even buy XXXL button-up shirts. He didn’t at all look that fat. Who the hell was this guy?

This was all concerning, but it wasn’t half as concerning as the next thing I discovered. I mentioned this story to a friend, and she told me she had spotted a different fact in one of his videos that seemed made up. In his video about the history of gay adult film, Somerton claimed that gay porn studio BelAmi had invented Skype. I thought I was hearing things. Surely, he just meant that pornography in general had influenced streaming technology in general, or maybe that’s what he had meant to say and misremembered it or fudged a detail or something. But no, it wasn’t a misspeak. He was very clear and detailed about this: He had a whole full segment that porn – specifically gay porn – had literally invented dozens of web innovations, climaxing with how this specific porn studio had created this specific branded technology. “What a weird thing to say!” I texted back. “What an incredibly weird thing to say!!!” Who just says something like that??

At that point I was off to the races. Something about the sheer inanity of “Gay porn invented Skype” set something off in my brain. I wanted to watch everything he had ever made. In February, I watched another video, and he claimed that England had had a homophobic propaganda campaign against Italian tourism. What? When?? I clicked another random video and he said China was faking its box office and announcing it only in English to taunt the West. What? What?? (I was saying “What?” a lot at this point.) I wouldn’t have caught either of these shady claims if I wasn’t looking for them (in both cases, my brain didn’t flag them until long after I’d finished watching). Where were these supposed facts coming from?? My brain went into “Gotta catch ‘em all” mode with his weird facts; I had to get 100% completion. This wasn’t me being offended, or crusading for truth or anything; it was me laughing about what a bald-faced liar he was. What insane thing might he say next???

My amusement with the situation didn’t override my objections to attacking another YouTuber, though, and the other YouTubers I talked to about it can attest that I was pretty conflicted about what Harry was planning to do – and for that matter, conflicted about what I was doing, hate-watching all his videos. Sure, I was beyond amused by the buckwild things this guy would say, but I didn’t enjoy how much I enjoyed it, it felt trollish. He was just some YouTuber, a nobody, not a real writer or anything. Even though at this point all I was doing was laughing at him in private, I felt mean-spirited, like I was a bully punching down on him (never mind that he made more than me on Patreon and he had 300,000 subscribers, a lot more than some of my friends). On the other hand, this certainly wasn’t wasted time; I was learning so much, both from the stuff he had stolen and stuff I had researched just to debunk him. I can legitimately say that my understanding of homosexuality and culture was expanded and deepened by watching James Somerton’s videos, even though by this point I was aware that he had plagiarized much more than I’d realized. After a point you began to spot it very easily. You could Google random phrases you liked and they’d come up. If he ever quoted anybody, that was a good sign that that segment was plagiarized -- he was too lazy to find his own quotes, he just stole from people who had found quotes. As I recall, the initial accusation against him was that he’d plagiarized the documentary The Celluloid Closet, but he’d deleted that one, and then, while I was browsing his back catalog, he released a new version of it that promised to be longer and more detailed. I found a copy of the original book version of The Celluloid Closet online, and boy oh boy, in the twist of the fucking century, he had just read the first forty pages or so into the camera and passed it off as his own. It was garbage.

But I wasn’t really looking for plagiarism, which honestly I didn’t really care about, certainly not to the extent that Harry did. Harry’s personal bugbear was plagiarism; mine was misinformation. I quietly started asking people on Reddit how the Chinese box office worked and if there could be any fraud involved. I kept looking for more bullshit. Not all his videos turned up anything and I wasn’t expecting much when I clicked on a video about the Scarlet Witch’s children, which I assumed would be just a dull comic book recap. I had become able to pick out Somerton Originals very easily by that point, and oh, how I perked the fuck up when I saw him spin a very dubious story about Marvel writer Allan Heinberg doing a PR campaign against his bosses because they wouldn’t let him write gay characters. I eventually amassed a bulletproof case debunking it, a process that took me weeks. By this point, my amusement at his bullshit had started to turn back into genuine offense and anger. He was actively defaming people at this point, and it thrilled me to find proof that he was lying. I had found my Stephen Glass. And yet, I was still resistant to thinking about this guy as fair game. So then what was I going to do with all this information I was acquiring?

I don’t know why I did this much worrying. In Shattered Glass (which I revisited about two or three more times over the course of last year), Penenberg doesn’t worry about the ugliness of calling out a fellow reporter. He doesn’t fret with guilt over the harm he’ll do Glass’s career; it’s not like Glass is owed his job, especially after ethical lapses this severe. Penenberg isn’t even outraged at Glass’s crimes against The Truth™; he just found a juicy story and he was excited to share it. So why should I be worried about Somerton’s well-being? Besides, I didn’t have any control over Harry, who was going to be doing all the heavy lifting here anyway, not me. By that point, a lot of people knew about Harry’s impending video and behind-the-scenes chatter about Somerton was starting to really simmer. In April, Somerton started crying on a livestream that his Patreon income had suddenly plummeted to about half of his usual and he might have to quit making videos; my colleague Dan Olson publicly accused him of lying (and privately, so did I – I know how Patreon works, there’s no way this could be true). Over the course of the next year, I would find out that many YouTubers, including some I didn’t even know, had beef with him. If nothing else, Somerton was a way into being part of the YouTube community again; I had stopped feeling like a part of it a long time ago.

Around May or June, I decided that I would probably say something when Harry released his video, in a Twitter thread, or something. The Marvel thing was keeping me up at night, and I knew that Harry was probably not going to cover it, and I figured someone had to tell everyone it wasn't true. And honestly, I had to write something about it, for the simple reason that I was burnt out as hell. In 2022 I had made some of my finest work (if I may say so), and I felt like I’d peaked. I found it harder and harder to keep up the pace, and I felt hemmed in by talking about just music for as long as I have. In between episodes, most of my productive energy was spent researching Somerton, not music. I wanted to try something new. I’m making enough money now that I can follow my fancies where they take me, and I needed inspiration; if I had enthusiasm for something, I had to follow it. (This also led me to compile a playlist of songs that “Stop” on the word stop to listen to on a roadtrip later that summer. I got so engrossed in it that I drove for 14 hours one day, and when I got home I spent the next week compiling it into a half-hour long supercut. I had to follow my muse. I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A “Trainwreckord " But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time.)

Eventually, I just decided to fight past my aversion to drama. I wanted to cover this if Harry wasn't going to. I asked HBomberguy if if he was going to cover Somerton’s… imaginative inventions (and, honestly, to see if he objected to me horning in on his idea – who’s the real plagiarist here, Todd?) He seemed okay with it (though part of me still fears that I ripped him off). I started speed-racing through Somerton’s episodes, trying to watch them all before Harry released his video in July (which is what I had been told was the target date – lol). By the end of July I realized that I had way more information than would fit in a Twitter thread, and I started considering releasing it as a podcast or something. Maybe even a video. In August, I sat down, wrote out everything I had found, recorded it. I spent two and editing it, and then I put it up privately on my YouTube. And then I saw Taylor Swift at Sofi Stadium that night. Then I went on summer vacation the next day. The video would sit there unseen for the next six months. I wasn’t sure I was going to publish it, but I figured that once Harry finished his video (which I believed would probably be within the next couple weeks or so – again, lol), I could see what he had made and decide if I wanted to show mine.

In the final video you see above, I say that I had it 95% done in August, but that’s not really true. As Harry continued to not put out his video for the next five months (look, I get it, the man’s a perfectionist), I continued to make rewrites, tweaks, edits. I asked a historian about pirates and rewrote that section based on what he told me, I consulted with actual lawyers to confirm some things, I made my line deliveries stronger. I still didn’t feel good about releasing it until I thought about it harder and wrote what I thought was a really strong conclusion. In hindsight, I could have made it less dry, or done it on camera, if I’d known I had plenty of time, but in truth, I wanted to be Mr. Just the Facts on this. It made me feel better about doing a callout, which I still had misgivings about – even though by that point, having watched all Somerton’s videos, I had really started to loathe the man.

James Somerton wasn’t just a thief and a liar; he was a fucking idiot. He’d make screamingly insulting arguments, like how the current gay leadership were a bunch of complacent pussies and that’s why homophobia and transphobia were on the rise – never mind that it was actually a backlash to the growing visibility and power of trans people, what an insulting thing to say to anyone brave enough to be trans right now. He was a truly terrible media analyst: He thought the emcee in Cabaret was a Nazi (he’s not), he thought Glass Onion was “camp” (it isn’t – and don’t fucking argue with me on this), he disliked Forrest Gump because of its “seeming refusal to acknowledge how much luck Forrest has for being in the right place in the right time” (what the fuck do you think the movie is about, you dipshit? The central metaphor is a feather floating in the wind. The most famous quote is that life is a box of chocolates because you never what you’re gonna get. You fucking shit-for-brains.) He had a whole thing (in more than one video) about how Janelle Monae came out of the closet because everyone was too stupid to know that “Pynk” was a queer anthem and Janelle felt compelled to clarify it for the dumb straights. Bullshit, there was tons of coverage about how gay it was, and Janelle had rumors about her sexuality as early as her first album – her coming-out article mentioned those rumors explicitly, and certainly didn’t mention anything about dense heteros not getting it. He argued that Dua Lipa had stolen credit for the disco revival from Janelle, as if the two of them sound anything alike or that disco hadn’t already been an ever-present undercurrent in music long before Janelle. I decided against including these in my video, since misinterpreting media is not a crime (although the Janelle thing was bad enough that I eventually re-added it). But it sure made me despise him.

Worst of all was that while I was fact-checking him, I’d find comments from people just straightforwardly repeating his fictions as facts. That did a lot to get me past my instinctual fear of drama. How dare you. How fucking dare you. You lied to your fans and now they’re repeating you. Look what you did, you little jerk. In October, I had a nagging feeling I’d missed something big in the whole Nazis-invented-abs claim so I did another search, and I found his bullshit claims being repeated on Deray McKesson’s fucking podcast just the previous week. I hit the roof. This dumbass was Inception-ing his stupid terrible ideas into the world, using the credibility he got by stealing the work of honest writers. I rewrote the entire intro of my video to include it. I also continued to hate-watch his videos as he released them and add new bullshit. Literally the day before it went live, my friend and resident vampire expert Elisa got back to me that she finally had time to watch that vampire video he'd just made, and I was just stunned at how much she found that I'd missed; I added one last entry at the last second. Those newer segments, the ones I wrote and recorded after August, sound much more agitated and angry than the ones I wrote before.

Still, I knew the consequences for him would probably be dire. His channel would die. He would effectively lose his job, not an easy thing to do to a person. Plus, there was a strong undercurrent of loneliness and sadness in his videos – sometimes outright text rather than subtext – and I couldn’t help but feel for him. I myself am also a weird loner isolated by this terrible career, so I sympathized. I started to get nervous again. I had mentioned my little side (?) project to everyone I knew on the East Coast while I was on vacation; many of them were surprised that I’d want to wade into drama, which isn’t like me.

D-day approached. Kat (Harry’s producer) told me the video was almost done. In the late morning hours of December 3, 2023, they sent me a link; I was only halfway through it when it went live. I saw why Harry had taken so long. I think that he too was worried about the optics of a beatdown by someone of his stature, so he had covered all his bases proving that Somerton was truly one of the lowest of the low, one of the scummiest and worst YouTubers who had ever existed on the platform. I am probably the second-foremost expert on James Somerton at this point, but there was so much I didn’t know. I didn’t know about James preparing to throw his cowriter under the bus. The plagiarism was genuinely so much worse than I had realized (and I had realized quite a lot). I didn’t know that shit about his beef with the “Love, Simon” writer. I’d been worried about this guy’s well-being? I couldn’t wait for this motherfucker to be destroyed, and from what I could tell watching Harry’s video, he absolutely would be. This was a fucking homicide. Somerton’s career would be laid waste by the end of the day. He also mentioned a Discord server, which I actually had known about but not used as a resource for my video – I was curious about the fallout of Harry's video so I snuck in there to observe; but I also started digging around in the backlogs and I found the part where Nick admitted the fat Nazis claim was based on “raw observation.” I’ve never been angrier. I had read so much trying to be sure that I wasn’t wrong about it, trying to be sure that I wasn’t falsely accusing them, and this motherfucker was just straight up admitting that he had made it up. No, I’m sorry, he had “observed” it as if you can just look at changing beauty standards and decide that the Nazis must have done it. My fucking God, fuck you.

Harry and Kat had asked me to wait a couple days before I published my video; they were concerned it would look like I had set this up with him, or that we were teaming up to bully him. After 24 hours, I asked them again how long it would be before they were comfortable and I wasn’t stepping on his toes; Harry and Kat said you know what, go for it. I dropped the second nuke.

I had promised myself I wouldn’t gloat about this, that I would remain professional so as not to feel scummy. I did not keep that promise. This was the funniest goddamn thing that had ever happened. HBomb’s video had so thoroughly destroyed Somerton’s reputation overnight that there was now a massive market for James Somerton content, and the views for my video skyrocketed. This was the biggest video I had ever made in my life. It’s a shame I don’t do drama content, because it turns out I’m very good at it. My video isn’t as slick or as sharp as Harry’s but I did do more work than it might seem. I deliberately started with “Gay porn invented Skype” to start off with something fucking ridiculous, and I dropped his most offensive lie – that the SS was dominated by gay men – early, around twenty minutes in. It’s like a roller coaster; you start with the biggest drop early so that the momentum carries you through the rest of the ride (with more drops later, like a lie that the Nazis invented abs, to keep the thrills coming). It clearly worked; for the next three hours, my mentions were flooded with the same three jokes: "Todd with the steel chair!!," "A second video essay has hit the James Somerton," and "Stop Stop He's Already Dead!!" The most anit-callout friend I have texted me to tell me that I had done a good and necessary job, which put my mind at ease a lot. Obviously this wouldn't have happened if Harry hadn't opened this lane for me to walk through, but I had been convinced that my basic, barebones video would pale compare to Harry’s. I joked with a friend that it would get maybe ten views. As I write this, it just hit a million.

And that brings me to right now, typing this to you. What happens now? I guess I go back to working on the worst list. I’ve been able to be successful for as long as I have been on YouTube by staying in my lane – not for the audience’s sake, but for my own sake. Structure helps me focus. Will I ever do a video about this again? Almost certainly not. For one thing, I still can’t help but feel guilty; Somerton as a person is too pitiful to feel good about his downfall, and even though I regard Nick as a willful dolt and a pathetic Renfield of a human being, I worry that I was too harsh on him. I do believe James probably did more of the lying than Nick. I’ve gotten a lot of comments from people who were shocked that I did this, since I’m so averse to drama. (I am in fact so averse to drama that it bothers me that people know my business well enough to know that I am averse to drama.)

But also, here’s the thing: Where on Earth are you gonna find another James Somerton? He fell in my lap, Harry found him first, and there is almost no one who is going to either 1) plagiarize that fucking much or 2) present such insane whoppers as facts. Here’s the thing about Somerton; he’s wildly entertaining. What gets me is that there are probably dozens or hundreds more guys like him, who are systematic plagiarists but not so much so that it would be worth the effort of exposing them, or people who spread as much or (most likely) more misinformation but not misinformation so wildly, hilariously afield from reality – in other words, people you wouldn’t watch a four-hour video about.

I asked a movie critic friend to review Shattered Glass some 15 years ago (the review, like so many things, is also gone from the Internet). My friend liked it a lot, but he said that to him the conflict in the movie wasn’t between truth and lies, but between journalism and entertainment. He thought journalism hadn’t done enough philosophically to confront the fact that journalism basically is entertainment, that so many of the things that make good news are the same as the things that make good advertising. If I found another guy like Somerton who wasn’t as funny, would it even be worth it to me to expose him? My critic friend also said that Shattered Glass was good but couldn’t quite be great, because Stephen Glass’s victims were all abstract concepts, not real people. His crimes were against The Truth – Glass made up a fake story about misbehaving Young Republicans, and he didn’t smear anybody because they weren’t real. He didn’t hurt the reputation of any young Republicans, but he did hurt the reputation of Young Republicanism, just like when he made up a fake story about a teenage hacker holding a software company’s data for ransom, no one’s reputation got hurt, except the Internet’s reputation for safety. That’s just hard to turn into a movie that really hits. It’s hard to get people to care about abstract concepts like The Truth being damaged. I did my best. Now I can move on my life. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Final Part. My sincere apologies for spamming.

 

[Ninon42]

And honestly, I had to write something about it, for the simple reason that I was burnt out as hell. In 2022 I had made some of my finest work (if I may say so), and I felt like I’d peaked. I found it harder and harder to keep up the pace, and I felt hemmed in by talking about just music for as long as I have. In between episodes, most of my productive energy was spent researching Somerton, not music. I wanted to try something new. I’m making enough money now that I can follow my fancies where they take me, and I needed inspiration; if I had enthusiasm for something, I had to follow it. (This also led me to compile a playlist of songs that “Stop” on the word stop to listen to on a roadtrip later that summer. I got so engrossed in it that I drove for 14 hours one day, and when I got home I spent the next week compiling it into a half-hour long supercut. I had to follow my muse. I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A “Trainwreckord " But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time.)

There's your answer as to why he's so obsessed with songs that stop on the word stop: a burnout distraction.

 

[Random Internet Person]

There's your answer as to why he's so obsessed with songs that stop on the word stop: a burnout distraction.

Finally. It feels so good to have an answer.

Also, the write up about the James Somerton video is pretty fun to read if you’re into that sort of thing.

 

[Ninon42]

Rare Todd Twitter W

 

[Random Internet Person]

As bad as Todd may get about politics, at least he is not like this.
View attachment 6140999

View attachment 6141004
For context his guy is another music reviewer in the same sphere as Todd.

And what do you know, he’s got a thread: https://kiwifarms.st/posts/15876813/bookmark

 

[Arthur Morgan]

There's your answer as to why he's so obsessed with songs that stop on the word stop: a burnout distraction.

He's done videos like that before, like his 'top ten nutshots' video. I don't begrudge creators for having side projects that they do for fun so that they don't burn out. As long as it's a side project that doesn't keep the creator away from the thing that made them (George RR Martin). It was actually interesting to watch because there were a ton of songs I'd forgotten about, or at least forgotten they stop on the word stop.

 

[Ninon42]

Here is a podcast Todd was on back in March that I don't recall being posted here earlier.

It also features Mic the Snare and Dany Roth talking about cultural resets in music (and no, I will never call him either Lina Morgan nor a journalist, for both are lies and lies give you cellulite).

 

[Random Internet Person]

He's done videos like that before, like his 'top ten nutshots' video. I don't begrudge creators for having side projects that they do for fun so that they don't burn out. As long as it's a side project that doesn't keep the creator away from the thing that made them (George RR Martin). It was actually interesting to watch because there were a ton of songs I'd forgotten about, or at least forgotten they stop on the word stop.

I’m just happy I have a reason for this thing he does.

 

[Horace P. MacTittes]

View attachment 6136839

Also, I just now saw how the thumbnail changed.

So is this what Todd is doing for Trainwreckords? Being topical? The Slap Heard 'Round the World happened? Time to review "Lost and Found" by Will Smith. Justin Timberlake got arrested for drunk driving? Time to review his album "Man of the Woods". Did Faith Hill warrant any headlines for Todd to review "Cry"?

 

[Horace P. MacTittes]

His mom is a Vietnamese woman who immigrated under less than legal conditions and his dad is a basic American white guy with Irish heritage

I do recall a very old tweet of Todd's mentioning that his mother was from Mali, which would make him part-Black, which would certainly explain his pro-Black behavior--especially regarding people like Morgan "Nigger Guy" Wallen.

 

[Ninon42]

I do recall a very old tweet of Todd's mentioning that his mother was from Mali, which would make him part-Black, which would certainly explain his pro-Black behavior--especially regarding people like Morgan "Nigger Guy" Wallen.

She's on Facebook and has both a very Vietnamese name and face (which I won't link but isn't that hard to find). He also mentioned his aunt having a nail salon in the Virginia Beach, VA area and they are 95% staffed by Vietnamese. The guy is Vietnamese and 'Merican of Irish and other Euromutt heritage.

Crossposting this from the Nebula thread:

I missed this PR announcement which was even in Deadline and Variety (the wording is exactly the same in both, so no reason to read one over the other) on 4 June 2024:

Spotify Teams With Creator Hub Nebula On Video Streaming Initiative​

The content used for this collab are an uh interesting selection using Todd in the Shadows as an example. He has not, to my knowledge, promoted these audio feeds on his Twitter, in his latest videos or anywhere else, so maybe the goal is to see how much organic interest they can garner on Spotify from a non-invested audience. Todd also has an actual podcast but that isn't being promoted, just the audio files of his YouTube videos.

In short, some Todd episodes of OHW, PSR and TrainWreckords can now be found in audio form on Spotify. There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to what has been posted so far.

 

[Ninon42]

Sorry for the double post. Common Todd Twitter L with respect to Trump getting shot.

 

[Aaron Costello]

She's on Facebook and has both a very Vietnamese name and face (which I won't link but isn't that hard to find). He also mentioned his aunt having a nail salon in the Virginia Beach, VA area and they are 95% staffed by Vietnamese. The guy is Vietnamese and 'Merican of Irish and other Euromutt heritage.

Crossposting this from the Nebula thread:

In short, some Todd episodes of OHW, PSR and TrainWreckords can now be found in audio form on Spotify. There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to what has been posted so far.

but his videos arent really suited for audio form imo as a lot of the episodes talk about music videos... They're as suited for audio form as nostalgia critic videos are.

 

[Edgeymcedgename]

Sorry for the double post. Common Todd Twitter L with respect to Trump getting shot.
View attachment 6186969

How do they think this makes them look?

 

[Random Internet Person]

Sorry for the double post. Common Todd Twitter L with respect to Trump getting shot.
View attachment 6186969

Theater always brings out the most obscure references and comments and points one would try to make.

but his videos arent really suited for audio form imo as a lot of the episodes talk about music videos... They're as suited for audio form as nostalgia critic videos are.

As I said in the Nebula thread: I have to wonder if this move is showing that Todd isn’t seen as one of Nebula’s heavy hitters. I think it’d make more sense if instead he’d release a bonus episode of Song vs. Song for this scene, or have a bonus episode sponsored by Nebula brought out from behind the paywall.

 

[Ninon42]

How do they think this makes them look?

Like part of their chosen tribe. It's virtue signaling, plain and simple.

As I said in the Nebula thread: I have to wonder if this move is showing that Todd isn’t seen as one of Nebula’s heavy hitters. I think it’d make more sense if instead he’d release a bonus episode of Song vs. Song for this scene, or have a bonus episode sponsored by Nebula brought out from behind the paywall.

He's the music guy and Spotify is primarily a music service. Synergy between audiences more than clout, I should think.

 

[Random Internet Person]

He's the music guy and Spotify is primarily a music service. Synergy between audiences more than clout, I should think.

Well let’s see how that ends up working.