Todd In The Shadows Thread

While it's definitely not the only thing (again, as you mentioned, mainly late 00s/early 10s reviewers were doing the "angry shit talking riffer" shtick popularised by AVGN and NC), the Change The Channel whistleblow doc from last year revealed that reviewers contracted on the site were, if not mandated, then certainly incentivised and persuaded (in some cases to the point where it may as well been mandated) to make content in the style of Doug Walker's brand of "snarky/angry shit-talking reviewer". You can see this in how quickly Lindsay Ellis and Kyle Kalgreen's content changed after they departed from CA.

I noticed that Todd's style did change over time during his tenure at CA, getting more and more subdued and analytical over time. Which, coincidentally, kinda coincided with the higher ups at CA getting less and less invested in their talent on the site outside of Doug Walker's content.

But also generally, he's matured into his own style. Which typically happens with this kind of content. At first you start out taking inspiration from the people who inspired you, but over time you start to fall in your own groove unique to you.

I think the shift started in 2012 when he started making OHW videos but really started to codify in 2014 (I still think his reviews of Float On and Wiggle to be the two funniest reviews he's ever done.)

Edited by PippingFool on May 30th 2019 at 10:42:18 PM

That's happened to a lot of reviewers from the late 00s/early 10s actually. Even guys who werent associated with CA like Rebel Taxi, Rob the Wonderful, and even TV Trash originally started off as angry reviewers making snarky jokes constantly, but moved on to more analytical/historical stuff (while still keeping the humor), now it's rare to see any AVGN/NC knockoffs on youtube or anywhere else. Getting back to Todd, I think OHW made him change his focus as he had to focus now on musical history and why a song was a hit at a certain time, meaning he had to be slightly more serious.

Speaking of Taylor Swift...

You Tube version should be up pretty soon by now.

So I'm a Panic At The Disco fan, and am... fond of Taylor Swift, but this song pisses me off personally. I know it's perky and tongue in cheek, but came out as soon as I left a relationship very similar to it, all egotistical and self serving in public but ugh, pretty abusive in private. It's dumb, I just associate it with bad.

Strange, I never really noticed the change in tone between his old and recent videos… maybe because I watch them out of order…

x4

Yeah, I did notice that how after he started OHW, a lot of that "what nerve did this particular song scratch at the time to make it so popular" started to bleed more and more into his current pop song reviews.

Edited by PippingFool on Jun 1st 2019 at 11:36:50 PM

It's live on yt.

"It sounds like the Glee version of itself." Oof.

Savage but True.

Edited by PippingFool on Jun 2nd 2019 at 1:22:51 AM

That is an outright poetic way of describing the song.

Why is Taylor Swift popular again?

I cannot fathom the appeal of her or her music.

Honestly I think Todd changed a ton for the better through dating/living with Lindsay and hanging out with a lot of the more educated/knowledgeable crowd that was on CA before #changethechannel. His pop culture takes are a lot sharper and his commentary is a lot more informed than it used to be.

When she first started out she catered to a specific audience that wasn't being catered to at the time (young teen girls) outside of standard Disney channel slosh. A lot of her earlier songs in particular feel like they came right out of her diary and deal with challenges that girls face ie starting high school, romance, your relationship with your parents, break ups, friendships, etc. Her first big hit was a cheesy but cute love song about going on a car ride. And at her very best she's a down right poet. It's honestly a shame that when it comes to her last few albums, the weakest songs get the most radio play.

The song she wrote for her dad is an absolute tear jerker.

Edited by Zanthype on Jun 2nd 2019 at 10:08:25 AM

I'm gonna make a bold prediction for the next episode. From what I understand Todd has been holding off on doing a OHW episode on "Bitter Sweet Symphony" by The Verve because they're one of those British acts that was huge in their home country and was only a one-hit wonder out here in America, the kind of act he avoided talking about unless he was requested to do it like S Club 7. But I think now is probably the perfect time to cover it—I'm not sure who in here keeps up with music news, but recently The Verve was given all royalties for the song after the long-standing dispute over its sample and the publicity over it has led to the song slightly creeping back into the Billboard charts. Coupled with how Todd brought up recently on Twitter what songs could possibly be considered The Song of The 90s if "Smells Like Teen Spirit" wasn't already the absolute answer (though he doesn't explicitly mention Bitter Sweet Symphony in the conversation), I think it's gonna be the subject of the next episode.

Todd reviews "I Don't Care" by Ed Sheeran and Justin Beiber, another song that "Old Town Road" blocked from the #1 spot on the Hot 100.

What the everloving heck was that video?

Ed and Justin trying too hard...again. This time they just happen to be on the same song.

Yeah, the song really does suck. However, what I find more interesting is how Todd was absolutely right about the lack of great male pop stars these days. There's the awesomeness that is Bruno Mars and that's really it.

Justin Timberlake has more or less fallen out of favor with the public. Usher lost his popularity years ago. Somehow, Chris Brown has managed to remain popular which...ugh. I'm not sure if Adam Levine counts. I guess you can count Brendon Urie as a pop star at this point, so there's that.

Edited by deuteragonist on Jun 18th 2019 at 11:25:23 AM

For some reason my brain has a really hard time computing that Justin Bieber is an adult now. I can only associate him with the Cinema Sins video about Never Say Never, forever.

Regarding Todd's remark about importing the pop stars from Korea though… the American public getting interested in non-English popstars might not be such a bad thing. Though I didn't even know that was a trend.

PS: Lately I can't watch Carole & Tuesday without remembering his joke about the female equivalent of White Guy with an Acoustic Guitar being the White Chick with a Piano. C&T is a show about a White Chick with an Acoustic Guitar and a Black Chick with a Piano, which kinda proves him wrong.

It's mostly one group in particular, but yeah. All of their studio albums have hit #1 on the Billboard 200 and they've managed to score two Top 10 hits on the Hot 100. What's particularly sad is that it isn't that much compared to all the chart accomplishments of the big name male pop stars from America that Todd mentions in the video, and yet I hear way more about BTS on social media and such than any of them.

Regarding BTS and the social media/chart achievements disparity, there's kind of been an issue of radio-play and curated streaming playlists. (pop radio not really reflecting what music is actually popular at the moment has been an issue for a while that Todd himself has pointed out)

Ever since 2017, fans have noticed many incidents of radio stations ignoring requests or outright refusing to play BTS songs, or asking for thousands of retweets on Twitter (or followers) to play a BTS song one time (and then playing it once at midnight), all of which kept happening even after "Fake Love" hit #10. And even when sales and/or streaming numbers were higher for BTS than for certain other artists (at least during the first weeks), certain songs by other artists that debuted below #90 in Hot 100 were immediately added on playlists of radio stations and streaming platforms (such as Spotify's Today's Top Hits), with BTS being ignored more often than not. There's also how the industry and media - including streaming platforms - constantly lumps them together with other Kpop artists instead of putting them in the same category as artists with more similar sounds and/or chart numbers, but that's another can of worms.

A radio station that did play BTS regularly released an article last year stating that, in order to really get radio-play in the US, BTS should make a song entirely in English and do constant radio tours, which... well. Even ignoring the implications and the logistics, the members themselves later stated that they would not suddenly make an English album or change their identity solely for charts.

So you get BTS songs debuting high on music charts - with fandom power being a huge factor -, but failing to stay for long because of (as it seems to be the case) a lack of sustained exposure to general audiences, resulting in kind of a hopeless situation for fans in the US. There's also other factors, of course, such as BTS being more about albums than singles (with b-sides often being better than the title track), but it still seems to be a case of radio not looking at demand.

(sorry for the wall of text)

Considering the rapidly fading usage of radio in favor of streaming services, not getting airtime will probably matter less and less as time goes on. Didn't "Selfie" shoot to #1 on the Billboard charts solely through meme power? I know there was some novelty song that did.

And no, it's not "Old Town Road". This was before.

Edited by PhysicalStamina on Jun 23rd 2019 at 2:11:25 PM

Speaking of which, how is the success of a single even calculated nowadays? It's not like people still buy singles in stores, and as said above the radio doesn't have the power it used to…

"This Is America"?

#Selfie peaked at 16 in Hot100 and n. 1 in the Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart - there's also "What Does the Fox Say?", which peaked at n. 6 on Hot100, and "Gangnam Style", which peaked at n. 2, and that's not even mentioning songs associated with external memes, such as "Black Beatles" with the Mannequin Challenge, or the first verse of Bazzi's "Mine". Or the long history of novelty songs in general.

The very factor that it's a novelty song would make it more likely to be listened to/bought (and therefore, to chart) as a single and not necessarily as part of an album.

An important factor seems to be streaming, which is a huge part of the numbers of artists such as Post Malone and "Soundcloud rappers" in general. Though apparently people are still buying "Old Time Road" on iTunes, too.

Edited by DNAe on Jun 23rd 2019 at 7:08:30 AM

You know, every decade has stuff that gets made fun of years later. Stuff that people look back on and say "what were they thinking?" I think songs like "Me" and "I don't care" will fall into that category. That and stuff like Adam Levine's Girl's Like You. These songs will likely be seen as really lame and silly in the future.

When I hear about "I Don't Care", I always think about that British pop song about driving off a bridge or some shit.

Oh yeah, there's that… so do they also count views of the clips on Youtube or something?

I can only associate those three syllables with "I Ship It".

Edited by Lyendith on Jun 23rd 2019 at 3:33:15 PM