How "A Dose Of Buckley" Took Maddox's Spot
A chronicle of legacy youtubers losing and finding their spots in the game.
The editorial genre of ‘old man shakes fist at cloud,’ presented with sincerity and with tongue in cheek, is likely older than writing. George “Maddox” Ouzounian can at least say that he’s been doing the bit since before Peter Griffin had a “grinds my gears” segment in that Family Guy episode. “The Best Page In the Universe,” which launched in the late-1990s and was popular in the early-2000s, helped to pioneer what became a dominant style of comedic internet writing for a very long time: being a curmudgeonly autistic hothead with a chip on his shoulder about the thoughtlessness of pop culture and people at large.
Stuck-up writing about the stupidity of everyone who isn’t you is also a time-honored artistic tradition; but Maddox took it to the post-modern place that the internet age has been so defined by—pushing the attitude of self-aggrandizement beyond decency until it comes full-circle into making himself the butt of the joke.
Maddox was influential; some of his articles circulated long into the forums-and-blogs internet era (which was swallowed by social media at the end of the 2000s). I think there are two definitive ‘peaks’ in his career; the first one being when he published The Alphabet of Manliness in the early 2000s, which became a New York Times bestseller with multiple publications and circulated through high schools and colleges during the time when over-the-top masculinity was both ironically and unironically the in-thing culturally for men. After that success, Maddox made the mistake of continuing to zig when the rest of the industry was zagging.
At the end of the 2000s, Twitter and Facebook were destroying forums and blogs as the means of sharing opinions and content. Videos began to occupy the space of ‘five-to-ten-minute funny internet pop-in’ content, where short articles, forums and image boards used to sit.
Alongside Maddox, a wave of internet creators had crossed into traditional media with mostly awful results. Expectation became that internet creators would have to find their own models for getting paid by their audiences instead of hoping that they’d be scouted by traditional producers. Signal was rapidly giving way to deafening noise, and a lot of creators who rested on their laurels without figuring out how to change with the times were immediately forgotten and/or gave up.
In the ten years between Maddox starting to get successful in the 2000s, and when he started to get successful again in the mid-2010s, he made all of the wrong moves. He stopped posting to his site almost entirely—instead toiling at trying to get traditional projects launched to no avail for the better part of six years after moving to Los Angeles from his little hometown in Utah. He was getting chewed up in exactly the way that another Armenian warned me about in the song Lost In Hollywood (“I wrote you and told you, you were the biggest fish out here… you should’ve never gone to Hollywood”)—and worst of all, since his banner success had been that of his first book, he put his eggs in the basket of another hit in print.
Maddox’s second book (making fun of children’s artwork) was ill-considered in concept, poorly marketed, and released at a time when print media was practically wiped out by the 2008 market collapse; and also when every other successful internet venture was trying to figure out how to make money from video.
During that early heyday of video content blowing up on YouTube, A Dose of Buckley became one of Maddox’s memorable stylistic offspring. His gimmick was performing “musical autopsies” on pop songs by explaining how stupid and thoughtless their lyrics tended to be; eventually collecting the Top 10 Worst Hit Songs of the Year at the end of each (a tradition continued still).
I wasn’t a fan of Buckley in those early years; I didn’t listen to pop music, and so I’d never heard of most of the songs he was talking about, and was annoyed that he put so much thought into them instead of talking about interesting music instead. Yeah, I was too edgy and curmudgeonly even for A Dose of Buckley (but then again, I’m listening to King Crimson right now, so I guess that’s not a surprise). (I also struggled to tell him apart from Todd In the Shadows back then, who’s got a similar gimmick; but has expanded from negative content and become another of my favorite legacy creators on YouTube—possibly the best one talking about pop music.)
Buckley was an instant success. It’s hard to measure exactly how big that success had been anymore, though, since anything which blew up on YouTube in the early 2010s has ballooned in views exponentially as the platform has grown.
I don’t recall him being anywhere close to the half-a-million subscribers he’s now climbed to when I found him back then; and while his view-counts are no longer capping out at the heights of his older videos, the strength of his core following and subscriber base may be stronger than ever before. His sterling work ethic and careful channel-planning has kept him growing while other YouTubers who caught their first wind around the same time in the early 2010s such as Maddox and, yes, myself, have fallen by the wayside by failing to follow the same axioms.
From 2012 thru 2014, Maddox translated his style of writing to video in a way that clicked and worked, to the tune of nearly 400k subscribers and millions of views. His videos were somewhat short and came out too infrequently for him to have made a living on ad revenue at the time—but he was still doing self-fulfilled merch sales, and also launched a podcast with co-host Dick Masterson called The Biggest Problem in the Universe in 2013, which took on sponsorship deals and eventually become very popular. (Knowing what I was making on Patreon at the time and what Dick would make not long after the end of that original podcast, I know that Maddox left an insane amount of money on the table during this period by failing to capitalize on having engaged a larger audience than ever before.)
Maddox fell victim to believing he’d actually proven himself as the smartest guy in the room. He saw himself as a consummate success—an innovator who’d been ahead of the curve on the internet revolution, a best-selling author, and someone with a platform that he needed to use to empower righteousness. Even though he maintained an undercurrent of silliness in his writing, he became less-and-less an absurdist cultural commentator complaining about how people wear Kingdom Hearts pants and think they don’t like onions, and more of a Daily Show or This Week Tonight brand of politically-tinged social pundit, trying to make a point and seem sincerely intelligent.
This didn’t immediately work against him when he was picking flagrant targets to lambast, and at a time before doing so on video was extremely commonplace; but as his weekly podcast went on revealing cracks in his proposition of supreme intelligence and painting him as actually kind of a doofus, his attempt to fight the tide of people proving him wrong all the time spiraled him into misguided, overly-particular arguments that he couldn’t win.
I completely understand how this kind of thing happens, because it happened to me all of the time for a while. When I thought that the people I was arguing against weren’t seeing my point, I would make follow-up arguments and keep trying to UM, ACTUALLY my audience into agreement. It always sprung from an underlying boredom; I was reaching out to the internet for something to do, and so I would keep the conversation going in whichever direction it ended up getting taken so I kept having something to do; until the moment had passed and I found something else to occupy me. I think that the willingness to let go has kept me safer (except from people who can’t let go) than Maddox, who kept trying to bring all of reality to a halt until everyone would say that he’s right about something; and when he couldn’t make that happen, he moved onto doing something totally different.
It would take me forever to get into the bones of how Maddox destroyed his career in the messy aftermath of ending the podcast he did with Dick Masterson (which Dick now continues with co-host Vito). Some bearded person in sunglasses made an hours-long lecture explaining it ages ago—but these days, long story short, Maddox is ending a two-year stint of existing online only as a livestreaming banana and a cowboy character with psychotically-incomprehensible voices, watched only by undercover trolls. You’ll have to catch up on seven years of The Dick Show to get to the bottom of that rabbit hole (which isn’t the worst way you could spend a couple of months if you have that kind of schedule space).
Maddox left the spot of short, hilariously-written rants about cultural absurdity completely open—and there wasn’t much of a rush to fill it. By 2015, we were truly entering the vlogging era. ‘Cultural commentators’ became dudes in their rooms livestreaming and posting reactions to everything immediately upon hearing about it, and uploading inside of the hour. If you take time to actually write about a news event, you guarantee that you’re going to be a part of the second or third wave of content about the subject. This means that you have to write from the perspective of “you already know about this;” and so you really need to have a unique take or a funny writing voice to make anyone care.
A Dose of Buckley maintained those when he transitioned into topical weekly videos about whatever’s in the pop culture zeitgeist—but what keeps him alive is the added dose of maturity in his work that Maddox never reached.
Buckley must have realized that he doesn’t look smarter than the artists or their fans for noticing how the stuff they’re doing is silly. It’s simply fun for him to point out what makes him engage with something differently from those people who enjoy it without the same caveats. He chooses agreeably audacious targets, and gives some credibility and nuance to their strawperson while gleefully dismantling it. He’s the most innocent context for “let’s laugh at people doing stupid things” that still works on the internet; a Canadian dork in his early-40s who usually sounds overjoyed that something he likes doing as a hobby is still making him so much money.
Buckley has one of the most impressively-sustained release schedules on the platform, with incredible benefit to direct backers. He publicly publishes an essay video every week, and then an additional essay of equal quality exclusively to his Patreon backers (of at least $2) every week as well. I backed him and binged a lot of these—they are the shorter, less-topical rants, but still amount to the best bang-for-two-bucks value I can think of from a youtuber’s Patreon. He thanks his patrons with a selection of their names on-screen briefly at the start of his videos, and he is consistent. The humble effort of keeping the machine running on-time for years and years pays off the most in the form of community trust that one builds in the long run.
A lot of Buckley’s takes are inevitably disagreeable, but he never tries to rub your face in his opinion or call you an idiot for disagreeing unless you’re the singular person who did the incredibly-specific thing that he’s poking fun of you for in a video (usually making you a mainstream celebrity whose traceably-illogical decisions are fun to analyze). The point isn’t that “I am smarter than you,” so much as, “I know you are smarter than this—and maybe you could try acting like it.” It’s condescending, sure, but painted with such particularity and reasonableness that I think it’d be tough to get hard-up angry at Buckley when he talks about something you have an opinion on, because it’s so obvious that, to him, the world of celebrity gossip, political news and cultural analysis is an entertainment medium, and not a means for social change.
Maddox became a person who is insincerely sincere, whereas Buckley became someone who is sincerely insincere.
Maddox pretends that he has important opinions which people need to understand in order to better themselves. He became impossible to take seriously when he wouldn’t better himself by considering information which contradicted his beliefs. Buckley could detach himself from sincere stakes in the cultural conversation because he’s ben able to craft a fulfilling lifestyle inside of that bizarre society anyways; and he has an audience that clearly proves there are many people with the same feelings about mainstream culture. He’s got nothing to be actually angry about, and no need to pretend that he could have a larger effect, because he’s an entertainer and a comedy writer and not the smartest guy in the room. (A lot of culture is now massively roasting anyone who claims to be that guy in front of enough people.)
I rode a wave with Maddox and Buckley ten years ago, when YouTube started rewarding watch time instead of view counts and reoriented its design to encourage subscriptions; and we helped to usher in the genre of long-form analytical written videos about culture and media. Whereas Maddox and later Buckley tackled broad cultural conversations, and whereas Buckley got big by dunking on popular music, I became a big fish in the smaller ponds of discussing niche interests—starting with My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic’s brony phenomenon, and then moving into anime analysis.
When I started making rant vlogs constantly in 2016, I got a dual-reputation as a ‘philosopher’ and also a ‘psychotic drunken hobo;’ and I put a lot more of my sincere feelings and thoughts forward than either Maddox or Buckley ever did, which eventually led me down a different course as a media personality.
My career folly has been indecision over what I want from it. I saw Maddox destroy his career over pettiness and a feeling of being stuck; while I tore mine apart through indifference and a feeling of needing to constantly move when I’m uncomfortable.
What I know about Maddox and myself is that we both lack a kind of discipline which comes in feeling a sense of duty to society—to the “other” that is necessarily more intelligent than ourselves by mass. It’s pretty Canadian of Buckley to believe that if enough people tell you that you’re wrong, you might really need to reassess yourself; while I grew up listening to Mindless Self Indulgence singing, “you’re telling me that fifty-million screaming fans are never wrong; I’m telling you that fifty-million screaming fans are fucking MORONS.”
I find others often lovable for their moronic parts as much as for their sensical ones. I think that’s where Buckley has started to drift, and where Dick Masterson has been all along (actually the broken parts are his favorite). I’m not mad at the parts of myself that I hate—I learn how to be happy with them as well.
It’s hard for me to imagine spending an enormous amount of one’s short life being angry about what you can’t change, instead of laughing at the way that things are. If there’s something which I feel I owe to society, it is leading by example that I follow my gut to an enlightenment which I always crave, and that might inspire something to come from me which sparks a reaction in someone else and generates a new excitement. I have endless respect for those who can be like a rock in the stream and keep the flood from overwhelming the lands while slowly eroding; but I find myself amid the water molecules, chipping away at everything I come across and reshaping the landscape.