Three YouTube Critics I Discovered in 2020

The word itself tends to freak people out: critic. They imagine grey haired men sporting tweed jackets and snidely judging movies, books and records according to criteria inaccessible to whoever doesn’t have a fancy diploma stating they studied “serious art”. Anyone can be a critic nowadays, right? Only thing you need to do is create an account on Amazon, Goodreads or Letterboxd and tell it like it is. Criticism is now free and pure of pedantic academia.

Well, yes and no. While it is true no one trusts an academic anymore, educated spectatorship is more popular than it’s ever been. People love brainy weirdoes who make them feel smarter for liking what they like and you can find a boatload of these people on YouTube if you look hard enough. YouTube art critics are like that one smart friend who keeps challenging your perspective about anything or everything you’ve ever interacted with.

Here are three I discovered this year: movie buff Patrick Willems, electronic music guru Pad Chennington and mysterious pop culture wizard Super Eyepatch Wolf.

Patrick Willems

In order for a critic to be appreciated, it’s important to understand who (s)he is. The last thing you want is to sound like you’re the voice of good taste. People can have educated opinions on what makes movies interesting or what makes them generic and forgettable, but if something is popular enough it will find its audience anyway. This is one thing Patrick Willems understands very well. If you want people to lend you value, they need to like you first.

While Willems’ work is very mainstream oriented for obvious reasons, he never shies away from the neurotic, grownup nerd persona, which I find extremely relatable. It always takes a lot of place in his videos, which leaves the audience to decide whether or not he is credible. While I don’t always agree with him and find that he errs on the judgmental side, I’m always ready to reconsider my own beliefs when he makes a strong argument and he often does.

Pad Chennington

I discovered Pad Chennington completely by accident, while searching for Merzbow videos. While his take on Merzbow and noise music at large was fiercely original and eye-opening, it ultimately lead me to his channel, which has little to do with noise. Chennington is a Bandcamp adventurer, who introduces his audience to treasures of weird and forgotten electronic music: vaporwave, slushwave, mallsoft, deathdream and other oddities.

Remember that friend who introduced you to all the cool albums in high school? This is what following Pad Chennington’s YouTube channel feels like. I don’t know if he’s formally educated in music, but his breakdown of all things weird and electronic always focus on the emotional and psychological effect it has on you, so there’s no technical barrier to his approach. He’s a terrific storyteller, a keen listener and I believe a DJ when he’s not on the internet.

Super Eyepatch Wolf

The closest thing to a pop culture critic of all three. The mysteriously named Super Eyepatch Wolf has three main topics he obsesses over: anime, video games and pro wrestling. Sometimes he delves into odd obsession like fake martial arts or horror movies, but he’s mainly known for the three topics above. What I like about Super Eyepatch Wolf is that he explores why we feel so attached to topics that are culturally deemed to be silly.

His series on storytelling in pro wrestling is particularly close to my heart, because I find it is one of the pop culture experiences that raised me (which I’ll probably write about in 2021). Of course it’s fake and who cares if it is? What these guys do is not fighting. It is theater that reenacts the human struggle like it did in Ancient Greece. Super Eyepatch Wolf has the best quality a critics can have in the twenty-first century: he takes non serious stuff seriously.