Would a Pakistani person like Bob Ross? Cultural reaction videos soar in popularity

You hear a song you love and what’s one of the first things you want to do? Share it with a friend, of course.

That’s the very human impulse that started the YouTube trend of reaction videos. In these videos, people listen to music far outside their comfort zones and supposedly for the first time. Teenage rap fans listen to Dolly Parton. Rappers listen to metal.

Reaction videos emerged about 10 years ago, according to the Economic Times, but really took hold within the last five years. These days, content has expanded to cultural reactions.

For example, the a cappella group Pentatonix has more than 660 million views of its official video of Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen. By YouTube standards, this is pretty good, but not the best — Baby Shark Dance has more than 10 billion views. The Pentatonix version of the song is widely believed to be one of the top performances and is famous for its sublime harmonies. Could someone from an entirely different culture, who didn’t speak English, still appreciate the song? The answer, according to the YouTube channel Trybals is definitely yes.

The channel has a panel of about five people from small towns in Pakistan, each from different walks of life, who don’t have televisions. The channel gives their panel all sorts of different experiences and asks them to react: pizza (not so much); cheesecake (oh yes); Pop Rocks (no, they won’t explode like a bomb); Bob Ross and The Joy of Painting (who doesn’t love him?); and
Metallica (more than a million views).

Trybal is just one of the thousands of reaction channels from all parts of the globe, many of which have tens of thousands of subscribers.