“The Always Positive New Music Review Show Hosted by A French Professor”: The Intrigue of Professor Skye’s Record Reviews

Reviewing music is a heavily saturated market on YouTube. In a world of Anthony Fantanos, ARTVs, Mic the Snares, and Todd in The Shadows’, Professor Skye’s Record Review brings a unique perspective to the platform. With provocative titles, long-form academic reviews, an iPhone camera, no editing, and a budget microphone, Professor Skye’s no-frills and heart-filled style is taking the music community by storm. Skye Paine, 44, is an Associate Professor of French and Chair of the Modern Languages Department at The College at Brockport, State University of New York. Growing up in Boston, Paine was exposed to a wide range of music from his brothers. “I’m the youngest of four brothers, so all my brothers have different musical tastes. I just wanted to be like them. So, growing up, it was just an organic mesh of classic rock and hip-hop. [Jimi] Hendrix was the first musician that I heard where I decided I needed to dedicate my life to thinking about music. I begged my parents to buy biographies, I rented the documentary at the video store; anything that had to do with Hendrix. I did that with Hendrix, and I did that with The Beatles.” Along with Hendrix and The Beatles, Neil Young and David Bowie were two very important artists to Paine’s seminal love of music. “The first album I ever bought was a David Bowie cassette, his 1986 album ‘Never Let Me Down.’ That was a weird introduction to music, but that was where I got the idea that just sitting around listening to music is something I really like doing.” In 2000, Paine graduated from Wheaton College in Massachusetts with a bachelor’s degree in French, and earned his doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2010. Eight years later, Paine decided to start his YouTube channel. “I did it for two reasons. The somewhat sad reason is that it’s hard to get young people these days interested in learning a language, at least in America … so I needed another outlet: a place to just talk. The happier reason was, I was dating a woman and her daughter was really into YouTube, so I learned that YouTube was where the discourse was most interesting. I realized there was a place for me if I did my thing.” Furthermore, the decision was centered around guilt. “I had this weird feeling of guilt ever since I stopped paying attention to new music. Music meant so much to me growing up, and at a certain point, the ‘mid-twenties music death’ happens; it happens to everybody. You hit 24 or 25 and suddenly, the music that’s in the past is good, and the music that is now is not. I needed some way to fight that, and the channel was sort of an artificial way of pushing myself to do that.” Kanye West and Daft Punk were two artists that Paine still closely followed throughout his

mid-twenty’s music death. When Kanye released 2015’s ‘The Life of Pablo’, Paine subscribed to his first streaming service. Through Tidal, he decided to listen to new albums each week. In late 2018, “Skye’s Sweaty Record Review” was born. After some restructuring, Paine settled on the name “Professor Skye’s Record Review” in October of 2019. “Every couple of months, I’d have a big hit video for me. That would be maybe a hundred views or a couple hundred views. By the end of the first year, I had 360 subscribers, but I wanted to get 1 subscriber a day for as long as the channel was going.” With his reviews of The Strokes’ “The New Abnormal” and Fiona Apple’s “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” Paine noticed his channel was beginning to snowball. Coupling the intrigue of a French Professor reviewing music and Paine’s unique approach to reviewing music, the channel took off at the start of the pandemic. One of the most distinct features of Paine’s channel is the provocative, thesis-like statements that serve to title his videos. Examples include, “Beach House Makes Life Better”, “Big Thief and the TIME GOD,” “Hippo Campus Makes You Ride or Die”, and “The Weekend is Robert Downey Jr?” “When I started doing my videos, I titled them with three words. I thought that would be an engaging way to do it, but it just wasn’t. I realized if I had a summarizing sentence that’s a little bit off beat, a little bit unexpected, then that might draw people in.” Professor Skye couples these memorable titles with a unique concept in the YouTube music reviewing scene: he doesn’t review albums he dislikes. “I really believe in humanity and the importance of studying what humans can do. When I think about music, movies, or art, it’s more than just ‘Oh, someone made some cool content’. Human beings did something that is this amazing. Online discourse favours people saying, ‘this is trash, not good’. I don’t blame people; if I see [Anthony] Fantano call something ‘not good,’ I am more likely to click on it than if I see him giving a normal review. Our lizard brains like to see people being trashed. I’m trying to be a force against the snark and negativity. There’s a consumer mentality towards art, where consumers of art feel as if they own it, and I’m trying to be a force against that as well, and say ‘let’s just engage with the art as the artist gave it to us.’” In the years since starting his channel, Paine has collaborated with some of the YouTube music community’s biggest heavyweights, like Anthony Fantano and Mic The Snare, and has interviewed one of the most engaging bands in the modern landscape, Black Country, New Road. As of March 2022, Professor Skye’s Record Reviews has garnered over 35,000 subscribers on YouTube and shows no signs of slowing down any time soon.