the insulting algorhythm

Whenever I am listening to something off YouTube, and the selection in question ends and I'm distractedly doing something else and not making an active choice about what to listen to next... then  what plays next automatically is invariably a dub techno mix. Something that descends from Basic Channel / Chain Reaction but drained of all swing, soul, and sensuality. 

Things like this 

or this

as created by this anonymous - conceivably nonhuman - YouTube channel

What puzzles me is that this is not music that I habitually listen to, or indeed ever listen to. So where is the algo getting its data from? On what is it basing these suppositions about my supposed audio sweet  spot? 

If it was tracking my purposeful activity on Youtube - playlisting, watch-listens, searches etc - and  wanted to come up with something appealing to make stick me around... well, it ought to be choosing something from the following categories: peak-era ardkore and jungle, pirate radio sets and pirate radio adverts, weird old East European animations, Britcoms and TV plays from the 1970s, various sorts of avant-garde and electronic library music, maybe some jazz fusion and some reggae...

Below-par dub techno - it's one of the the last things I'd ever want to hear! Right down there with trance and landfill indie,

Truthfully, it's music that I've never listened to -  except for a period in the late '90s when I scooped up all the classic Basic Channel and for a while religiously bought each new Chain Reaction until the label went right off the boil. I did like Pole. I loved Gas. 

If I was going to listen to that kind of thing, I would listen to exactly that kind of thing - those artists, those labels. I wouldn't seek out some dilute knock-off version. 

But clearly YouTube thinks it's got the measure of me and that's someone who's easily palmed off with the ersatz and tertiary-level derivative. 

Perhaps it can tell that I'm preoccupied with something else, work or reading an article or following some internet spoor ... and thinks to itself "hmmm, this old fart would like something vaguely dancey yet inconspicuous, that'll putter along warmly and soothingly in the background". 

On the contrary - every time it drops into that marshmallowy amorphogroove, I jolt into alertness, exasperated - "not this shit again!".

I swear there was a week or two where it was the exact same mix that would restart in any YouTube lull.

Mind you, these dub techno and ambient techno and ambient dub techno mixes, they are all such featureless blanks, so boringly and un-alluringly titled,  I might just be imagining it's the identical mix each time... 

my life's been up and down since i walked from that crowd

 "Rave and Hardcore YouTube Comments Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity"

Pays to be a little wary of Vice articles, but this piece by Clive Martin seems to be a genuinely moved (and moving) appreciation of the wistful, earnestly reflective comments left by old E heads  underneath YouTube clips of house anthems and vintage rave footage

The comments are screen grabs so can't select any, but here are a couple of Clive's annotations:

"If you were being cynical.. you could dismiss their exhortations of the "old days" as merely the rueful people who can't grasp the modern dance world, with its live streams, forum trolls, and LiveNation wristband raves. And that may or may not be true. But it doesn't matter, because what these people are expressing through the unlikely medium of YouTube comments is pure romance. Regardless of what Positiva release caused their Proust-on pills recollections, these people seem to be genuinely conjuring up fragmented glimpses of a lost past, something that is infinitely more life-affirming and valuable than anything spat out by the usual "Hey, remember Pogs!?" school of internet nostalgia....

"I like to imagine misty-eyed men and women staying up late in their newly built homes, waiting for their kids to go to bed before they can transport themselves back to their carefree, wide-eyed, hands-in-the-air youths spent blissfully blowing holes in their psyche in New York warehouses and on Balearic beaches. It might be a bit tragic if they were still showing up at Warehouse Project three speckled Doves deep, still losing their shit to "Voodoo Ray" as Joy Orbison plays it 25 years later. But they aren't, I don't think. These are people who know that their raving days are over, and are looking back on them rather than trying to recreate them in some Hacienda historical reenactment society. In that way, these are examples of wistful longing rather than regressive nostalgia. "

One particular comment he re-presents - from a MrCockPirate, which moniker sabotages the poignancy a tad - goes like this:

Life has always disappointed me since those great days. Always remembered, never repeated.

Another, MyJamsta, concludes his or her reminiscence with:

I am still struggling to understand where it all went - it fooking kills me.

Those comments reminded me of "Weak Becomes Heroes" -  Mike Skinner's finest moment maybe - and specifically the line "my life's been up and down since i walked from that crowd" - that's what a lot of those YouTube comments are mourning, essentially: leaving the ecstatic crowd, returning to atomised normality, the privatised life of go-it-alone striving, where collectivity reduces to the dimensions of domesticity, the family unit

The next album, Skinner captured the bleaker side of clubbing excess... how you can be lonely in the crowd