My YouTube channels... explained!

I began YouTube way back in 2006. During this time I became obsessed with learning about the death of Kurt Cobain and spent hours upon hours researching into the conspiracy theories we still see pupported by legions of new fans today, twenty years later. I was probably one of the original fans of the mystery back then, and that's how I spent my free time... well and uploading to Youtube as well. But YouTube was much different back in these days.

The videos I uploaded included a shoddily filmed skate video... I had the footade digitzed properly and reuploaded that to my skateboarding channel HERE

I also uploaded videos of myself playing the guitar solo to a Jimmy Eat World song and a video wherein I solved a Rubix cube with a song by the metal band "The Bled" playing in the background. Back in these days any video would get thousands of plays and my guitar solo video garnered 18k plays before I took it down.

As time progressed YouTube became more important than ever and with new speeds (I can't remember it ever being that slow, really) it was officially an entertainment source. By then I hadn't created a worthy channel or online persona (Although I should have, because I might be a millionaire by now), yet it's not that simple. I'll explain more. Back in these days it was seen as extremely embarrassing to put yourself out there as an online entertainer and for somewhat good reason. My opinions and point of view at nineteen years old was not advanced enough. I also didn't have the discipline to carefully moderate what type of content I would put out there. I was also really quick to edit and remove videos as I wasn't sure how they were being received. A good example of this phenomenon was a song I made called "Just Dance."

I made the song "Just Dance" one afternoon while I was broke and unemployed. It was sort of like a joke, but I took the vocal takes really seriously for some reason. The composition of the music was decent, I guess. Certainly not bad for a twenty-two year old who was self-recording the whole thing. Then I posted the song online with a picture of myself in a "Young and Reckless" T-shirt with an expression of like "I'm the mannnnnnn" as the image to go along with the song.

The reaction to "Just Dance" was to garner a decent amount of plays, but as I saw the numbers increasing further and further I began to panic and I took it down. I could not handle it. A week later I was playing a live rock show with my band "The Handsome Men" at a VFW hall. We had just finished playing and everyone scattered around. It was still light outside. I walked down the street and ran into another guy whose band was going to play in about twenty minutes. Then I walked towards my bandmate's mini van and opened the passenger-side door, like I normally would have any other day. Except this day was different.

The van was packed with my entire band, and four or five other people, girls and the like. And pumping through the system was my song "Just Dance" and everyone in the van was hysterically laughing. I looked at their faces. One girl had tears running down her face. I felt embarrassed. But I had to own it. "Yeah, you like that!???" I said. I left the van, as they kept listening and laughing. They were laughing at me. I think. I can't really be sure what exactly everyone was thinking.

Another week later I was at a friends apartment in Long Island. When I walked in he was smoking cigarettes, and then he lit a blunt. Unprompted he put "Just Dance" on his iPod and played it through his speaker system. "This song is so f*cking good!! You don't even need a band. You ARE the band," he told me. I sat there, again, embarrassed. And high.

So if you're asking about why my YouTube pages aren't fully matured and have only been around for five or six years, you know the truth. Back then I just wasn't sure how I was being received. It was much harder to be a guinea pig YouTuber and a lot of them dealt with major blowback considering not only what they were saying and making, but the mere fact they were out there as "online personalities" back then was enough to write them off and cast them into the abyss as "try-hards" and "outcasts" even if they weren't.

I finally overcame this online persona struggly dichotomy when YouTube gave me a musician badge, because I had an album published through CD Baby and on streaming platforms. That was in 2020, six years ago. The badge gave me the confidence to say, "I got this."

Initially I experimented with a variety of video formats that included auto mechanic stuff, first-person driving videos, computer videos, coffee reviews, all sorts of stuff until finally I homogenized my content into music video reactions ONLY. But after several years I've decided to once again branch out and try to do general commentary. You can check that out on my "15 minutes on..." segments.

My second page is dedicated to my music and it should be much more exhaustive but unfortauntely I have not been an extremely dedicated archivist of my own music and so I don't know where the original files are. I don't have a copy of "Just Dance" anymore. If you have a copy of the song, email it to me at Mikedvmusic@gmail.com. Check out both of my channels below. Au Revoir!!

MAIN CHANNEL - https://www.youtube.com/@mike_del_vecchio