This isn’t anything that I’ve made. This week I’m going to reflect on a YouTube channel called Howtobasic.
A while ago a friend suggested I look up a channel on YouTube called Howtobasic. Knowing the friend I assumed it was maybe a satirical guide on how to be a “basic bitch”. I checked it out. Upon first glance the titles and thumbnails of the video looked pretty average. The thumbnail always featured some sort of generic stock image and the title simply said “how to…” followed by a variety of things such as “…make a big mac”, “...make a mcflurry”, “...make a rainbow cake”, etcetera. The content appeared to be all over the place in terms of theme.
As I clicked and watched one of the videos, it started off with a first person point of view shot of a man beginning to give his tutorial. Pretty soon eggs started to be involved. Then came different types of liquids, food products, and at times body fluids (not sure if real or simulated). I sat back in shock and disgust, aghast at the mushing, smashing, heating, cooling, and throwing, all accompanied by incoherent noises. It is strange, alarming, and really kind of horrendous…yet I could not look away and I watched 10 more of these videos.
Now there are plenty of weird stuff on the internet, and a lot of people putting out ridiculous content that will be watched. Howtobasic definitely falls into that category, with millions of views populating his strange videos. As I looked through more of his content, many of his videos came across more blatantly as something made to be purposely shocking, crude, and disgusting. I wasn’t actually sure what thought went beyond that in terms of those videos, and I could see how those things may appeal to some people’s sense of humour.
But as I started to go back to his very first videos, you can see that the concept of his content has always been the same. However, I would say that his older content was simpler, with less production, and focused more on impulse than foulness in many ways. I would say I enjoyed these videos more...if enjoy is even the right word for it.
Howtobasic’s videos go against everything regarding to what someone would normally want to see in an online video, or even in real life. It is so far from reason and sense, no end goal, no purpose. The fact that he is in a domestic environment makes it much more alarming for such chaos to occur, we can imagine it in our own lives. Is the man crazy? What is it about his aggression, his noises, and the noises of his materials that make these videos so interesting to watch? Maybe a part of us can only imagine letting all our senses go, and making the kinds of mess that he makes. Maybe there’s catharsis somewhere in the way he violently smashes the eggs and whatever else altogether into pulp. He is an experimentalist of colliding matter, an explorer of impulse, a scientist of “what if I just fucking smashed these eggs on the ground with ketchup and flour and my own pee? And squish it with my fingers, and torch it with fire, and fling it across the room” His videos make me feel the looming, imminent chaos that comes with chance. In life matter is constantly being smashed together, nature is violent. Anything can happen from one minute to the next.
Is it Howtobasic’s intention to have all this come across? Perhaps, perhaps not. But his videos continue to be a perplexing experience for me…always disgusted, always intrigued.
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amandla