The Radical, Generous Genius of No Life Shaq's "Reaction" Videos

 

I recently stumbled on an incredible YouTube phenomenon: so-called reaction videos. As the name suggests, people record themselves reacting to something they're experiencing for the first time — a song, tv show, comedy routine. I absolutely love this. It's so seemingly simple, so clean. You witness people reading the world, engaging difference, and seeing what comes.

But it's not that simple, really.  After all, what is more profound, more important, than how we engage difference? If you would, consider for a moment how you come to difference. Most of the time, most people come armed with all sorts of criteria for judgement. I can't date someone who doesn't have a career! Action movies are stupid! I can't stand acoustic guitar in my music! I only like real drums, not drum machines! Who eats that?

As a culture, we actually privilege such an approach. We call it sticking to your guns, being principled, staying true to yourself. But that's just the aggrandizing of bigotry. How in the world are we ever supposed to discover the new or enjoy difference if we tether ourselves to predetermined positions, principles, narratives of self, and tastes? If the world is in fact in motion — if we are indeed inherently temporal creatures — then being a rock, sticking to your guns, and being principled are anti-life as they are all attempts to prevent life from happening.

Mind you, I am not exempt from this judgement of judgement. When I picture myself doing a reaction video, I imagine grimace after grimace, mugging for the camera with vague contempt as some sedated rapper mumbles to sleepy beats. Such, alas, is my grumpy disposition — which is itself symptomatic of a more pervasive malady, namely, a fear of difference, of change — which is really a fear of, and disdain for, life. This is what Nietzsche would call an ill-constituted soul, one that works against life. (One of my favorite moments in all of Nietzsche: “What is it that I especially find utterly unendurable? That I cannot cope with, that makes me choke and faint? Bad air! Bad air! The approach of some ill-constituted thing; that I have to smell the entrails of some ill-constituted soul!”)

Now look at the video above by the brilliant, charming, inspiring, and generous No Life Shaq. Look how open he is to whatever comes. He doesn't try to tie what he hears back to what he already knows. Nor does he try to name or know it — that horrible thing grad students, and most academics, do: Oh, that's just Deleuze's notion of the rhizome, uttered with dispassion and a hint of disdain. Nor does No Life Shaq dismiss the song for being boring or different or not meeting his expectations. From the get go, he goes with it, letting it take him where it will. You literally see him being moved by the music, his face and body and words and thoughts being nudged in different directions as the song plays on. He is a generous, if inflected, canvas for the song.

It's an incredible thing to witness, to see life emerging, taking shape in and with his way of going. I find it so beautiful it makes weep with joy. For this is precisely what No Life Shaq delivers: unabashed joy, a radical affirmation of life. He never resists or judges. On the contrary, he actively seeks to go with the music, with its affective and intellectual flow, looking for the song's shtick. In a different video, listening to Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb," he inquires out loud about what he calls the "concept" of the song. I think that's as good a word as any for what we're talking about here: he looks for the concept of each song, for its logic, its operation, its performance, its question. His process is as much an intellectual operation as it is affective as, for him, moods and ideas emerge and commingle. It is an acrobatics of taste and thought and it's downright exquisite. Who can watch this and not smile, laugh, jump up with him? That is joy.

Now, No Life Shaq is no musicologist — at least he doesn't present himself as such. He doesn't know how to pronounce the name of the band; as for the song, he doesn't know "what it is." In fact, in contrast to how we're usually taught to present ourselves, he goes out of his way to refuse any institutional authority, proudly claiming his ignorance. He doesn't parse the song's structure or chord changes, its time signature, or even its historical import. No, the video is just him listening to the song. What, then, is his ethos, his authority? Why does this video have over 380,000 views? Because his acumen lies not in his expertise but in his skill as reader, his poise and receptiveness.

In my book, I call this immanent reading. Rather than beginning with categories — Rock, Rap, Country — and trying figure out where the song lives, he begins with the song and sees where it takes him. Marshall McLuhan would call him an amateur, a critic with nothing to lose, no domain of knowledge to protect. Experts put new things in existing categories, murdering them, sucking the novelty out. The job of professionals is to defend knowledge that already exists. So there's no possibility for anything new to emerge. Amateurs, however, are not beholden to any domain. They don't heed existing categories; they follow the song wherever it goes. Amateurs have nothing other than themselves, their experience, their constitution, their desires, their will. It's reading as a high wire act: the only thing holding their interpretation together is themselves in that moment. 

Watch No Life Shaq reckon. For that is what we're seeing: a reckoning, an emergent commingling of two bodies, his and "Freebird's": Out of the gate, bro, outta the gate, the beat, the instrumentals, whatever y'all wanna call it, is already talking to me....It's speaking words to us. Y'all don't hear that? C'mon man! He doesn't give us a map of the song— "Lynyrd Skynyrd was formed in such and such a place and time and so on" — he performs a tour. And like any good tour guide, he doesn't give us a checklist of "great" things we can tell our friends we saw. He doesn't share his his knowledge. He performs his experience. His critique if of "Freebird" is itself an event. As all critiques should be! Which is to say, rather than plugging things into known categories, critique is a vital event that infuses the received with new life. Why else critique?? Why else read someone else's critique if not to be infused with the novel, the different, the vital?? Do we read the world to accumulate knowledge?  Or to experience life, extend our ability to be affected, and affirm existence in all its wondrous, odd flux?

At the risk of sounding even more like an academic wonk than I already have, No Life Shaq's approach makes me think of what the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, calls intuition as distinct from intellect or intelligence. For Bergson, intuition is the most rigorous methodology of knowing the world. The intellect, he argues, comes from the outside to map all the points of a thing. Intuition, however, is mobile, moving with a thing, entering its different way of going in the world — a batter feeling for the way of a pitch as the ball hurtles towards him. Intuition, Bergson writes, is a method of feeling one's way intellectually into the inner heart of a thing, in order to locate what is unique and inexpressible in it.

The genius of No Life Shaq lies not in his discovery of masterpieces but in his mode of listening: the genius is precisely in the reaction, not in the revelation of content. So when I made the choice to read viewers' comments, I was dismayed — they're all about this young man discovering greatness. "You had me in tears.😂 It's like I said, I love watching you young cats hear this stuff for the first time. It brings joy to my heart." "And that my friend, is the best guitar solo in history." "This made my day. Glad you understand this now. You have good taste! Maybe one of the best songs ever written and recorded in history."

Oy! First of all, there's something so offensively condescending in these comments, as if this young black man is discovering the inherent genius of the rock and roll canon. Which is a symptom of an even more insidious disease: a focus on the what, ignoring the how. What matters to the commenters is that he's listening to this particular song — and, by liking it, No Life Shaq is catching up to what they already know, namely, that "Freebird" is a great song. In their eyes, and to their seeming delight, nothing new has been added to the world. The rules have been affirmed.

But the brilliance of No Life Shaq is his methodology, his openness and active participation in difference without recourse to expertise, knowledge, or institutional prowess. His brilliance exists with a fundamental indifference to the provenance of the content. It lies, rather, in his relationship to the new, in how he listens — not what he listens to. If he were just discovering things we all already knew were great, his videos would be cute, perhaps, but finally banal. No, his genius doesn't exist in his confirmation of the known: it exists in his affirmation of life itself.

What these YouTube comments reveal is the precise opposite approach to life: confirmation of the pre-known. They give his videos the ol' thumbs up because they think he confirms their world. But what he's actually doing is radical, undermining the very possibility of their posture in the world. These commenters are zombies, dead on arrival, preaching the virtue of what cannot be questioned. No Life Shaq, however, is creative evolution before our eyes, proffering the most radical methodology that undoes any possibility of a canon — going with the emergent difference of the world. They should fear him.

Zombism, alas, is the reigning technology of sense. I see this it at work in my son's high school English classes: they read books for their content, for their what. They never consider how the book says what it says or how critique operates. His teachers never consider the role of form and structure; never consider narrative, novel, sentences, the alphabet as technologies. They assume language — along with story and the novel — are given, neutral conveyors of information not to be questioned. Americans are never taught how to "read" critically,  never taught to seek the logic of meaning production, to be alive to the world as it emerges without recourse to citation and pre-existing knowledge. Just look at American political discourse: people continue to argue over this vs. that presidential candidate without ever questioning the presidency itself, what a republic is, what voting is — and whether we might do it all differently. And so the absurdity of our world perpetuates itself.

Life happens in-between — in-between you and me; you and ideas; in-between this, that, and that. It happens in the how more than the what — how we stand towards the world, the manner in which we hold our ideas, approach one another, the manner in which we think and make sense of this life. But all we're ever taught is to seek the known, seek confirmation of the greatness of some song or book. We stake our positions, stay true to ourselves, and stick to our guns so when life happens, when difference wields it heads and we're thrown off kilter, we pull our weapons and fire away, killing the budding life before us. This zombie technology of making sense is inherently violent. I want to suggest that if we were to teach critique as a reckoning of an emergent event, the mad violence of the world might dissipate a bit.

No Life Shaq, then, as a radical, undoing the technologies of violence by proffering criticism as generosity. His methodology is not just a winging it. It is a way of going with the world that is nimble yet poised. Note that he doesn't abandon himself as he listens, disappearing into the haze of Southern anthemic rock. He goes into the song poised, ready for what comes while simultaneously being absolutely himself. In this mode, there is no strict boundary between listener and song. There is only a going with: the song going with him, him going with the song. What emerges is something new, what Deleuze and Guattari call a bloc of becoming: a No Life Shaq-Freebird becoming. Those same French philosophers refer to this as a nuptial, a kind of mating in which neither party dominates (even if the give and take is not always equal). And that is surely what we see in this video, see in No Life Shaq's beaming smile: a nuptial, and it's beautiful.

In this seemingly simplistic video lurks a radical approach to life, an exquisite methodology of critique premised on a supreme generosity that affirms life, engaging things anew to discover what new worlds flourish there. This is what No Life Shaq teaches us: a technology of  sense making, a posture of standing towards difference, of doing criticism, that is open, affirmative, generous, joyous. This is what we should be teaching in our classrooms and homes: engage the world vitally and generously, maximizing its beauty.

After watching No Life Shaq's videos, I question the name of the category, reaction videos. For while he is no doubt reacting, he is surely creating. And this, in the end, is the most radical, generous, divine gesture possible: the creation of life.