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07 APRIL 2024
WHY IT'S IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO SUBSCRIBE TO RICK BEATO
WHY IT'S IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO SUBSCRIBE TO RICK BEATO
Great interviewer. Great analyser. Daft opinions.
Great interviewer. Great analyser. Daft opinions.
I (rightly) got called out on Last.fm for trying to generalise Rick Beato’s entire body of content into two pithy sentences, so I’m writing this as penance. This was originally going to be an article titled “Music These Days is No Good”: A Rebuttal, that I started last October... I wrote about two sentences before I got bored.
For the uninitiated, Rick Beato is a musician, music producer, and, above all else, a massive boomer. I mean that literally, he’s 61, though he admittedly looks quite good for his age. He also has a name which scans perfectly if you insert it into the chorus of “Smells Like Teen Spirit". I’m not entirely sure how he got big on YouTube, but it probably had something to do with him shoving his 5-year-old son in front of a camera and telling him to name complex chords while he played them on a piano. I haven’t watched those videos, but I imagine it’s mostly just the kid going “Emaj6add9… please can I play on my Xbox now?”
Anyway, for better or worse, my taste in music overlaps with Beato’s quite a lot. We like bands like Rush, Steely Dan, King Crimson, and most of the music now loosely defined as “yacht rock”, so naturally, his videos pop up a lot when I’m on YouTube. A sizable portion of his videos have been interviews with high-profile musicians, such as Steve Vai, Steve Gadd, Steve Morse, Steve Lukather, and a whole bunch of musicians not named Steve.
To his credit, Beato is a fantastic interviewer. He obviously has a passion for the music that’s being discussed, he’s very knowledgeable, and, as a fan of the music himself, he knows the right questions to ask, and most importantly, to let the guest talk. The interviews have a laid-back vibe, and mostly come across as friends talking about music, which is great to listen to.
Interviews are only part of his channel, however. Beato posts a lot of content considered more educational. He has a series titled “What Makes This Song Great?”, where he’ll dig right into a piece of music and discuss the intricacies of it at length. Videos discussing specific elements of songs are an offshoot of this. Take the video “THE MOUNT EVEREST OF GUITAR LICKS”, for example, where he discusses the intro of Allan Holdsworth’s “City Nights”. Now, the all-caps and clickbait-y title here can be, for the most part, forgiven (hate the player, not the game, and so on). And, to be fair, it is a very difficult lick to play accurately. I adore these videos, for three reasons:
He’s talking about music I like.
He can explain what’s going on in the song using music terminology that I occasionally understand.
He is positively gushing with love for the music.
It's the third point that means the most to me. There are so many songs I love with such intensity, and if I could explain what was going on, I’d absolutely make videos about them. It fills me with joy to see someone else so passionate about the music I love. You can almost see him at times restraining himself from acting like a big kid. That enthusiasm is so infectious, and I believe the world needs more of that.
There is, however, a darker side to all of this. A considerable amount of people have a strong dislike of Beato, for a variety of reasons, from the general smugness he radiates (see his profile picture), to his tendency to confuse his subjective opinion with the objective truth. However, the most egregious offence he commits, and the reason I can't subscribe to him, is putting out videos like this:
I'm not linking this one because it deserves no attention. Honestly, don't even bother looking it up.
I can guarantee anyone under the age of 50 who doesn’t say things like “I’m 16 and only listen to GOOD music like Led Zeppelin. I hate Justin Bieber!!” rolled their eyes when they read that title. It’s unabashed, cynical boomer bait. This isn’t a one-off, he’s posted other videos such as “Why Gen Z Doesn’t Care About Music” and “Why Today’s Music is So BORING”. Nothing but absolute slop, designed, not to make people think, but to make them mindlessly comment. Needless to say, he makes no coherent points throughout any of these. Just the ramblings of an old fart reminiscing about the time music he liked was on the radio.
Take the video about lyrics as an example. There are plenty of comments from people who, for whatever reason, tend to write everything as if it’s an email (Cheers. Cal), talking about how modern music is awful, and you just simply don’t get lyrics as good as those written by Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, Jackson Browne, and so on (I wonder why they only ever mention men?) anymore, even though all those artists have released new albums within the past few years. They are “modern music”. Besides, awful lyrics have existed for a long, long time:
“I want you
I want you so bad
I want you
I want you so bad
It's driving me mad, it's driving me
She's so Heavy
Heavy, heavy, heavy"
We can all cherry-pick rubbish to make a contentious point. This is nothing groundbreaking. “Good” music and “bad” music are both still being made today, just like they always have been, and always will be. The only difference is you’re no longer being spoon-fed it by Radio Luxembourg or John Peeldophile. If Click Baito wanted to make a point about music on the radio not being so great anymore, that’s fair game, but unfortunately for him, he could only squeeze one measly video from that topic. Anyway, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music etc, all exist and are easy to use. They all provide recommendations, which, given a bit of fine-tuning, can be very useful in discovering new artists. They’re not perfect, but they’re far more efficient than listening to the radio.
Word of mouth also exists. Talk to people! Ask them what they’ve been listening to! Ask them for recommendations! If they’re nice, they’ll suggest an artist you might actually like, rather than the one they only want you to check out because they like them. Last.fm is great for this. On every artist/song page, there’s a shoutbox. Whenever someone says something like “This one sounds a bit like [song]” or “If you enjoy this, check out [artist]”, I’ll listen to them, and, more often than not, enjoy it.
It’s really simple stuff. No longer do you need a sex offender to decide these things for you. Music is more accessible than ever, and I'd encourage everyone to make the most of it. It's all right here at your fingertips. Every song that has ever been recorded, on tap. If you're too lazy to seek out new and exciting music, and just want to listen to the same old bands forevermore, that's on you, but you can't act as if you're taking some sort of moral stand and not expect everyone with at least half a brain to laugh at you.
Concerning Rick Beato… I don’t know what his financial position is, but I’d imagine he’s doing alright for himself. He has over 4 million subscribers, he’s seemingly friends with a ton of musicians who he grew up listening to, and these musicians always seem to be falling over themselves trying to get an interview with him. I reckon he’ll keep going for a long time. It might be a bit hippy-dippy to say this, but I think we’d be a lot better off if he stuck to discussing the positives of music. There’s enough pessimism out there already. Judging from the fact he's self-aware about being an "old man yelling at clouds", he should know better. Just like how it was silly of me to dismiss his channel in two sentences, it's silly of him to dismiss modern music in a video title.
The sooner he realises he doesn’t need to pander to old fogeys and people who think the absolute pinnacle of humour is saying “What the fuck is a Bladee?” (as if they’re somehow too dense to pick up the answer from the provided context) with some half-hearted clickbait to keep his channel afloat, the better.
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