Music on Reality TV is Insanely Manipulative

The use of stock music on Reality TV (Gordon Ramsay & Kitchen Nightmares, America's Got Talent, The Bachelor, Married at First Sight, etc.) has become more blunt over the last 20 years, constantly reusing the same tropes to present a simplistic, highly reified portrait of people & animals. Misrepresenting the world. In this video I break down the most common musical tropes used across various types of Reality TV comparing them to similar tropes used in nature documentaries to show how manipulative and unsophisticated they are.

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Subtitles by Pentameron

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The 'Other' in Music

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About Archetypes in Branding

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Helpful Reification Links:

Introductory:

Reification, Music and Problems of Modern Philosophy - Jonathan Lewis, 2014

Adorno: A Critical Introduction - Simon Jarvis, 1998

Advanced:

History & Class Consciousness, Georg Lukacs, 1923
Dialectic of Enlightenment - Adorno, Theodor, 1944

Philosophy of Modern Music - Adorno, Theodor, 1949

[ViiZedek]

As a former tv editor, i am also guilty of this music destruction. But holy shit i laughed like crazy at the happy sad hornblasts

[alalag]

The autosad+inceptihorn AI it's probably one of the best shitposting ideas I've ever heard

Someone should develop a dating show where all of the contestants are composers who have to write a leitmotif (with specified instrumentation) to follow them around, giving everyone the ability to establish their own vibe.

I could see myself getting into that. "Wow, this baroque pipe organ number is a bold choice for a character theme. I like this person and hope that they end up getting together with that bland nothing person they're inexplicably pursuing."

[BdR]

Side note, it's not just the music that is so ridiculous. The woman in the white top at 16:07 who is presented as a shy single mom was actually already an accomplished professional singer.

Before appearing on America's Got Talent, she had CD and DVD deals, a couple of top40 hits and she had performed (more than once) at the largest venues in the Netherlands.

[infinitemausoleum]

Honestly random footage with the inception horn constantly going off and changing the footage sounds like peak postmodern humor.

[DBruce]

Who's that handsome chap you're standing with in the intro, and why hasn't anyone noticed him yet?

[lvlpaint]

The inception horn blasts over random footage is literally the memes my zoomer little brother shows me. We're already at that point lmao

[vitriolicAmaranth]

As someone who grew up in Florida, where there are alligators (a type of crocodile) in like every lake, the horror music over the crocodile was really funny. They spend 95% of their time lazily floating around, 4% looking like giant dumb dogs abovewater and 1% biting things that practically walk into their mouths because they're so lazy that prey animals just assume they're safe.

[travishein]

The bird eating the worm. * Ominous music starts* ... this was brilliant.

[Skip]

Wouldn't be a Tantacrul video if it didn’t descend into a surrealist nightmare at some point. I love it.

[josecarlosgarcia]

16:04
-"I'm tired of being judged"
- Goes to a reality where she will be judged

[zanescents]

The dog part really had me cracking up man! You said “we totally missed the part where the dog can READ AND TALK!”
Simons face and the broken keyboard music will be forever be engraved into my consciousness

[aprofondir]

"I'm tired of being judged" - goes onto a show with actual judges

[BenLevin]

This video is absolutely stellar. I am so glad you mentioned the complex lives of animals and how often we miss the chance to consider their sentient experience!

[jamesspartin]

As someone who works in this industry, the music composer is ALWAYS the last step and often times rushed and given either little or too much direction. It’s not easy by any means. A lot of the time, the director will ask for vague styles and use non musical terms to describe what they want such as “epic” or “dramatic” and then rush the composer to finish the entire score in very short periods of times. It’s not the composers fault.

[ecyor]

I actually remember when I was little, nature documentaries being almost devoid of music - the narrator would be providing commentary on what was happening, maybe embellish a little to set a certain mood, but you were basically left to just digest the behavior without emotional herding towards a particular interpretation.

[Uptomyknees]

dude have you seen Tik Tok? We're ALREADY at sad/happy NOW, I don't even wanna think about what's next

[readyforlol]

I'm not even a sound guy, i'm a VFX guy, but when i walk through the living room while my mom is watching TV i can often call out what's gonna happen next in the show or who the bad guy is despite not knowing anything about the show and its characters, just deducing from cinematographic language and the music used.

All those series are built on the same blueprint, i swear. Anyone claiming AIs will never be able to replace artists working on those needs to take another look at their production, because you wouldn't even need an actual AI to get a computer to mimic it easily.

[anerrorhasoccurred]

I’ve always thought that The Bachelor + it’s spin-offs were basically just the equivalent of harem anime for boomers 💀

[redram]

“… and the dog’s a dog”

I must admit I laughed far too much at this joke than I had any right.