Meet the YouTuber who struck it big by breaking down the songs he hates

There are certain motifs you can expect to find in one of Pat Finnerty’s YouTube videos: enthusiastic shout-outs to Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, for example; or the ever-expanding mobile of guitar pedals that hovers like a halo above his head; or his undying disdain for music producer and fellow platform personage Rick Beato.

Finnerty, 42, is the creator of What Makes This Song Stink?, a popular YouTube series that explains, as you’ve probably guessed, why certain songs (mostly ones written after 1995) stink. And though Finnerty has only produced seven full-fledged episodes to date, already his videos boast a distinct ethos: They are at once charmingly scrappy, full of recurring bits and snarky in-jokes; and yet, on the matter of musical analysis, they are impressively cogent. Watching a Finnerty video is like being transported into the mind of one of the characters from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, only in this world they’re also extremely talented at performing and scrutinizing music. (Finnerty, maybe not coincidentally, lives in Philly, and is also a musician in his own right, playing guitar most recently with the band Strand of Oaks.)

His videos are also increasingly meta. He’ll excoriate Weezer for writing a song like “Beverly Hills,” but he’ll also go to great pains to dissect whether the musical and vocal arrangements on the song are actually any worse than Weezer’s earlier, more acclaimed stuff. And yes, Finnerty will tell us why Machine Gun Kelly’s “Emo Girl” is a reductive clunker, but along the way he’ll create his own parody emo band, called August Is Falling, and convince Butch Walker—a guy who produced albums by non-parody emo bands like Panic! at the Disco and Fall Out Boy—to actually mix one of their tracks. 

Admittedly, it’s all kind of, well, a lot. But it’s caught on: In the year since Finnerty debuted What Makes This Song Stink? he’s amassed nearly 150,000 YouTube subscribers and has launched a companion podcast that features a rotating guest list (W. Kamau Bell went on last month). His fake-but-maybe-not-totally-fake band August Is Falling even released an EP . . . which was among Bandcamp’s top downloaded punk albums.

Fast Company chatted with Finnerty about his growing YouTube fame, his abhorrence for groups like Train and Staind, and what might be next for August Is Falling. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did this whole thing start? When you were making the first video, for [the 3 Doors Down song] “Kryptonite,” were you just trying to entertain yourself?

We’re talking pandy [Editor’s note: That’s Finnerty-speak for the pandemic], we’re talking shutdown. I couldn’t do anything, and I’m a musician so I watch a lot of YouTube music stuff. And I just noticed that there’s this boys’ club of all of these people that are just talking about gear endlessly. These videos are huge; all these people are just talking about, like, tube screamers, and there’s 200,000 views on these videos. And then there’s this guy Rick Beato, who’s talking about what makes a song great, and some of them are good, but then some of them are just like . . . he’s talking about [Blink-182 bass player Mark] Hoppus’s bass tone, how great it is in “All the Small Things.” And I’m just like, this guy’s highlighting the bass part to “All the Small Things.” 

And then I was like, “Well, I’ve got nothing else to do. I’ve always wanted to bridge music and comedy, and I have a war against these songs we’ve had to hear our entire lives. And then I just went with my phone and made [a video] about “Kryptonite” because I fucking hate that song. It made me laugh and I put it out, and nobody watched it. I put one out about [the Kid Rock song] “All Summer Long”—a couple hundred views.

And then you made the Weezer video.

Yeah. And the Weezer people are real; when they find you, they get you. But being a Weezer fan, I used it as a way to tell my life story: I went back and recounted what it was like for me as a Weezer fan when I was in high school and how they got shitty, and then how life kind of gets shitty. That really was the first one that got out there and got people watching.

The Weezer video was definitely a step into more out-there territory, and it’s only gotten stranger since. Why the shift?

There’s enough people that are just saying, “This song is great because it’s got an augmented chord” or “This song is bad because it uses this chord progression.” And I certainly do say that, but at the same time, if I’m going to do these things, I want to try to give it more of a personal spin. For me it’s more about what makes these songs that I really don’t like the ones that I have to hear when I’m in a Walgreens. It’s not so much “what makes the song stink?” It’s “what makes this society sick?”

And have you gained any insights into that question? 

I mean, these are things that I’ve always known. Being a musician, and watching endless documentaries, everybody kind of knows that pop music is basically a factory. There’s a certain amount of songwriters that write a lot of pop songs, and they are just built for the masses. And some of them are great, and some of them are just absolute bullshit. So what I try to do is really call it out. 

I just try to picture every step of it, like when it comes to Train with “Hey, Soul Sister”: They were like, “You know, I heard a ukulele on a car commercial. Maybe we should try that.” And [Train singer] Pat Monahan is like “Maybe I should say ‘I’m so gangster, I’m so thug.’” Then I’ll hit the pause button and think, wait a second, what’s really going on here? We’ve got ourselves a 45-year-old man from Erie, Pennsylvania, that’s calling himself gangster and thug. I mean, there’s a problem there.

But you also talk in your videos, albeit sporadically, about musicians you do admire.

When I’m calling out this bullshit music, I try not to be so negative. It’s like, this is bullshit, but it’s only bullshit because all of this other stuff is out there. It’s like, I can sing every line to a Staind song, but most people don’t even know that Robert Pollard from Guided by Voices is living on this planet. Here’s a guy that’s written 20,000 songs that are better than “It’s Been Awhile.”

Have any of the bands you’ve mocked watched your videos?

What’s interesting is that the video that has the most views is the one that I did on “Dani California” by Red Hot Chili Peppers. And someone just sent me a picture the other day with [drummer] Chad Smith with this tiger shirt on, and in the video I gave him the nickname “Big Cat.” Now I’m not saying [he saw the video]. But the video got almost a million views. There’s a chance that maybe someone in their camp sees it; and maybe, just maybe, they embrace it. They’re cool enough guys—and I think that they are [cool], I mean they’re the Chili Peppers, they’re not the enemy—that maybe, just maybe, he’s like “you know what, I am gonna wear a big cat shirt now.” 

What’s the latest with August Is Falling? That joke became a serious success.

There are some radio people trying to get it on like major radio, and it was the top-selling punk album on Bandcamp for a couple of weeks. It was added to Spotify’s new music playlist, but it was in the algorithm of pop punk bands. With August Is Falling, I was really making fun of this band Simple Plan, and now August Is Falling is right next to Simple Plan in the algorithm. I kind of worked it to a point where I don’t know what I’m gonna do with it next.

Do you want to tour with August Is Falling?

No! I feel like—and I hate this term—I might have jumped the shark a little bit on this one. The whole thing revolves around [the What Makes This Song Stink? Episode on] Machine Gun Kelly’s song “Emo Girl,” which is just this exploitation of the genre. And I have nothing against pop punk or emo, but what this guy was doing was obviously bullshit. So I just thought, if you’re gonna do a song like Blink-182, make it better than “Emo Girl.”

And it’s already surpassed everything I’ve ever done as far as Spotify plays. I’m trying to get the band onto the When We Were Young Festival next year, maybe. But I want to do auditions. I want to have 22 year olds in the band and I’m just the manager on the side.

You mentioned that August Is Falling has seen more Spotify success than anything else you’ve done. Is that weird for you?

No, because they’re songs that I wrote. And I’ve always written genre songs. I mean, the Beatles fucked us. They made us think that we could be different and cool and weird but still have these amazing pop songs. But the reason I still like August Is Falling is because I crept in a couple of moves and tried to make them interesting.

I’ve noticed you often make fun of YouTubers on your videos. But at the same time, you’re now part of that world. How do you reconcile your dislike for the algorithm with the fact that you’re on the algorithm?

I’m a hypocrite, I’m full of shit. [Laughs] And it’s a little heartbreaking. But I think that there’s a way to do it. As far as YouTube goes, there’s just too much “click the link below” and “make sure to subscribe” and “hit the bell.” It’s fucking endless. All these YouTubers are like, “Oh, yeah, you just need to get this guitar and plug it into this amp and use this program.” And I’m giving them a place where you don’t need to worry about, you know, buying everything that all of these people on YouTube seem to think is attainable for people. And I made my catchphrase “Don’t click the link below.” I wanted [the YouTube channel] to be more of a place where people that are exhausted by those “click the link below” guys can come and know, hey, I’m with you.

Earlier, you talked about how some bands are clearly great while others are, as you put it, “absolute bullshit.” But maybe not everyone can make that distinction, or would agree on those labels. So, how do you tell the difference, exactly?

We can go get a couple of hot ones and talk about this one for a while. [Editor’s note: That’s Finnerty-speak for chatting over coffee.] It’s hard to qualify. People could call me a “music snob,” but it all goes back to the Beatles for me. They had those melodies, but also they were challenging us as far as things like chord progressions go and [finding] how far to push a pop song, you know? 

Or Nirvana: They’re a pop band, right? But the melodies were put over this powerful music, and their chord progressions weren’t always just the stock things. Kurt [Cobain] was kind of moving the power chords around in a weirder kind of way and finding melodies that worked over them. Now, if I was [Bush frontman] Gavin Rossdale in 1994, I probably would have wanted to do the same thing. I mean, that music is just so fun to play. I’m not coming down on him for wanting to sound like Nirvana. It’s just that when you know what the premium stuff is, and then you hear that, it’s tough. We have to believe these people. I do, at least.

A lot of people will comment under my videos, “Who the hell do you think you are? They’re selling out arenas. What are you doing?” And these bands are fine. They don’t have to worry about me. But I’m the one that has to hear these songs.

So, of all the bad bands out there, who’s the worst?

Oh, man, this is a tough one. Could be Train. They’re like an evil Aerosmith. They just keep coming back. But I feel like for worst band: Staind. [Frontman] Aaron Lewis is just one of the worst people on this planet.

And how about the most underrated band? 

Most underrated, I think, is Floating Action. They’re criminally underappreciated.