Abstract

This essay presents a collage of free-floating notes, thoughts, quotes, memes, YouTube comments on the reception of pop music on the internet. Content and questioning concern music reaction videos on YouTube, centring on my engagement with a particular online reaction - that of YouTuber ‘TCtheTopCat’ as they film themselves listening and responding to the track 'Reborn', from the eponymous 2018 album ‘Kids See Ghosts’. As audiovisual, autobiographical narratives, what kind of accounts and experiences do music reaction videos instigate and circulate? What kind of reactions do they action and re-action? How do concepts of 'otobiography' and 'sonic fiction' help towards understanding these online music experiences, iterations, exchanges? How do music reaction videos extend logics of autobiographical signing and countersigning already present in processes of music production and reception? To what extent do my musical listening, my engagement with reaction videos, and my writing about these things here in this zine / journal, constitute instances of my 'commodification of difference'?