The Ken Burns of YouTube: Soundtracking Jon Bois

ISSUE #252

About a dozen minutes into The Bob Emergency, a YouTube documentary about the dramatic decline in the number of Bobs in professional sports, director Jon Bois pauses his statistic-based presentation on the history of great athletes named Bob to zoom in on a square that reads “Bob Cyclone: No Photo Available.” Here, narrating in a wry monotone that riffs on the common vloggo voce, his virtual camera pans over a line graph that starts laying out the dismal fight record of whom he calls “the most obscure Bob I found—a Bob who, were it not for you and I, might never be dwelled upon by another human being ever.”
 
“His final record: zero wins, 13 losses, nine of them knockouts,” he tells us. The camera starts to zoom out slowly, the line graph he's built of Bobs throughout the ages looming like Olympus Mons over the starry horizon of the Google Earth interface he uses as a sandbox. The beautifully ethereal library-music song “Zero Gravity” starts to play. He continues:

 “He left us nothing but this lonely little fight record hidden deep within a boxing database. Through it, he tells us two things: first, that opponents absolutely painted the canvas with him; and second, that he came back, night after night, to face his certain annihilation again and again. And we will never know why.
 
But he was a Bob. He played a note in this symphony. He mattered.”

This is one of many moments that showcases the supreme humanism of Jon Bois and the special voice he brings to sports documentary. He is “the poet laureate of sports statistics,” and our greatest living documentarian outside of Ken Burns and Adam Curtis. His documentaries all stream from Secret Base, his YouTube channel, and include Section 1, about the plane that crashed into the stands at a 1976 NFL playoff game; The People You Pay to Be in Shorts, about the Michael Jordan–owned Charlotte Bobcats in 2011-2012, the worst team in NBA history; and his franchise series, The History of the Seattle Mariners, The History of the Atlanta Falcons, and, currently airing, The History of the Minnesota Vikings.
 
As of this week, I’m finally on the Jon Bois Train. It was only a matter of time—if you’ve been on Letterboxd for any substantial amount of time between 2020 and today, you’ve seen one of your nerdier friends log one of his documentaries—but, as with all masterpieces waiting to be discovered, I was shocked at how hard I was hit when I pressed play on The Bob Emergency. His work isn’t necessarily for sports fans and stat nerds, though it will satisfy them too. His aesthetic and structural innovation, the scientific depths to which he plunges, only make his movies more accessible to the public. You don’t have to know anything about baseball going in. You don’t have to know anything about anything. Like a digital Ken Burns, you can lean back and know you're in good, explanatory hands.
 
But I haven’t even gotten to the hook: Bois’ use of music is absolutely sublime. He soundtracks his documentaries solely with library music—stock music that’s not traditionally copyrighted and is licensed to the public for audiovisual use. Bois makes heavy use of saxophone- and synth-laden cheese: “I hoped," he told Filmmaker Magazine, "that if you saw a sports video scored with crusty easy-listening music, it might pique your curiosity enough to stick around and figure out what the hell is going on here.”
 
He's being modest—this isn’t just a vlogger being different for different’s sake. Typical of a great researcher, the songs and composers Bois finds are ripe for reappraisal. These are great songs by massively prolific composers who never got to get their due, master songwriters who pumped out track after track for use in PBS documentaries, archivist projects, and the works of public filmmakers everywhere—and for the good of art and storytelling at large. These are the true heroes, because stock musicians eschewed profit in favor of mankind, so middle- and lower-class filmmakers and storytellers could use their work to serve a humanist message. Also, because the songs low-key rip.
 
“That was the utility of those music selections, I guess, but the real reason was that I just love that shit,” Bois said. “Our company affords us a license to the APM library, and when I first started poking around in it, I was blown away by just how much stuff there is in there. I’ve basically spent years crate-diving; it’s honestly one of the most fun parts of my job. I immediately became a fan of Keith Mansfield, who did stuff like 'Style City' during his easy-listening phase, and weird electronica stuff like 'Flying Dragon' from the legend Dieter Reith.”
 
In this way, library composers like Keith Mansfield, Alan Hawkshaw, and Brian Bennett are similar to Ken Burns and the documentarians they serve These artists put out work at an alarming pace with little reward—like Bob Cyclone coming back to the ring—for the use of everyone, because that’s how you live a good life, as a good man. You share knowledge because knowledge longs to be shared. It's the only way we're going to get better.

Deep into The History of the Seattle Mariners, Bois caps off his riveting segment on Ichiro Suzuki to zoom out yet again:

 “The Mariners aren’t special on account of their lack of success. It’s just that success is entirely irrelevant. We’ve entered another realm here: one that’s far larger and doesn’t operate on the dead currency of winning and losing. Unless you let those limits go, you’re an astronaut who brought your wallet. The Seattle Mariners are not competitors. They’re protagonists.”

Let us all be protagonists today—let us all by Bobs—and listen to this beautiful music, forgotten until a huge nerd dug it up. These are the songs of the people. These are the songs of Jon Bois.

---