The Decemberists recently had to deal with some decidedly less-than-artistic lyrics. The indie folk rock band who just released their seventh album on January 20, 2015 appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live and sung some rather ridiculous YouTube comments.
Kimmel starts the segment by explaining how The Decemberists write “interesting, very intelligent songs about uncommon subjects,” and then jokes they’re working on an album centered around YouTube. The band proceeds to play selections from this fake project, covering every kind of comment you expect to see on Google’s online video site, from shallow to vicious to self-promoting. They conclude by singing a comment which calls the 2005 MIT commencement speech “boring” five times in a row.
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Despite younger audiences loving the online video site, YouTube comments have never had a very good reputation. The anonymity afforded the site’s users before 2013 allowed them to write any trolling, hateful, or even completely unrelated comment they wanted to. Google tried to rectify this by forcing users to connect their Google+ accounts (which require you to use your real name) to YouTube at the end of 2013.
In the end, Google received lots of negative feedback about the change, even getting backlash from Vlogbrothers’ Hank Green who said most YouTube users work for years to build up their personal accounts and don’t want to see them disappear. Some YouTubers (like PewDiePie) have toyed with turning off comments altogether, while other creators see the flame-bait responses as perfect opportunities for comedy and for showing just how overblown many of the commenter’s arguments can be.
The Decemberists and Kimmel were just the most recent people who decided to use the insanity of YouTube comments to their advantage, and we’re sure glad they did.
