Youtube has been short on good music channels for a while. Ever since FrankJavCee dipped out, the scene has felt kind of lacking. Sure, there will always be great guitar tutorials and covers. Fantano is fine in terms of telling people how to feel, but do we really have a channel that is straight up, fun, in the way that FrankJavCee is?
Yes, finally, once again, Youtube’s music scene is fun again. That fun is being provided by a small music blogger named onlysmallbites.
Onlysmallbites started fairly recently, as far as content creators go, in late 2019, with instrumental reproductions of Kanye West songs. He had done songs off albums like Graduation, Late Registration, and even Yandhi. All of these made for artful recreations which anyone can rap over now. Even better, he made a video explaining the process and what he did in FL Studio to recreate each beat. After he was done with reproductions, onlysmallbites switched over into the world of blogging, complete with a simplified rant-sona, more in the style of Sam O’Nella as opposed to Kothorix or The Dishonoured Wolf. With that genre of videos, he dropped a few hot takes on Kid Cudi’s Man On The Moon III, on Playboy Carti’s Whole Lotta Red, The Weeknd’s fake cosmetic surgery and a few other more broad topics, such as issues with collecting vinyl, or how hype-culture can often taint how we see certain albums.
Still though, onlysmallbites had yet to break through, until finally he used his animation skills in conjunction with his ability for music production to create an animation called Basically Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. in 30 Seconds. Essentially, he took random bars from the album and arranged them to tell a story of Kung Fu Kenny going from a D+ to an A on a school test. He uses no supplemental audio, just his animation, and the lyrics off the album. The algorithm smiled upon this project, and let it end up in the suggestions of millions of Youtube users.
The video flowed perfectly, creating a marriage of old-school youtube poop style editing, with the linguistic insanity that hip hop gives us every now and then. The style actually feels like a natural evolution of Muchdank and his legendary sentence mixing videos, only this time using animation to actually depict the scenarios the outrageous mixed sentences are saying.
He later followed it up, with another 30 second video summing up Kanye’s Yeezus in 30 seconds, which ended up telling the story of a comedic and chaotic date night with Kanye West.
Essentially, out of these albums he has created a dada style story, almost like a found poem, but packed up in a 30 second package. This is the type of stuff that would make a perfect Adult Swim bump.
While there is certainly potentially to do more 30-second albums, as there’s a whole litany of LP’s that have enough suspect lyrics to make another set of stories out of, what would be best is if onlysmallbites used these vids as his channels hook so that he could then keep viewers attracted enough to check out his vlogs. His writing and editing on those is solid enough, and his opinions are certainly nuanced enough to keep the listeners open-minded, willing to accept new perspectives.
Whichever direction he decides to go, he’s certainly set to do well.
