I’ve been hanging around the edges of YouTube for years and years, and for a long time, I was a snob about it – imagine me, a snob. Back in its early days, I saw YouTube was kind of the junk drawer of original content: so many people doing so much stuff, with no rhyme or reason, just heaped into a random URL. So much of it was substandard, and all of it so poorly organized, that it was hard to find anything that was new or fresh or frankly not so poorly made it was hard to look at. But that was before I ran into Kennie JD.
Now, don’t get me wrong, there is still an amazing amount of mediocre-to-bad content on YouTube, with new tsunamis of bad crap rushing in every day. But a few years ago I came across a – sadly – short-lived ‘light news’ show produced by Phil DeFranco called SourceFed with a smart and sometimes funny ensemble, and it looked and sounded and felt professional and smooth and … well, good. For all sorts of reasons, SourceFed faded away after a couple of years, but it got me looking for other decent content – and a few creators over there have endeared themselves to me, while many other podcasters or filmmakers have moved over to YouTube, or echo the stuff they create elsewhere in YouTube channels. And it was my far-more-wired-than-I-am daughter who said, “You should look at this woman” … which finally brings us back to Kennie J.D.
Kennie’s in her late twenties – just had a birthday, in fact — Happy Birthday, Kennie JD! — and she’s wry and funny and extremely smart. She started by doing, of all things, make-up tutorials with commentary – an interesting choice for a good-sized color from Detroit. But they caught on. And she was just getting started. Kennie’s a songwriter and musician as well – you can hear her work on YouTube, and on Spotify – but I caught up after all that was well underway — more than a year ago through just one of her channels, her Saturday show, Bad Movies and a Beat, where she watches a really awful movie – the kinds I love the most, of course – and then makes a ten or twenty or even thirty-minute video about it, laughin’ and swearin’ and carryin’ on through a blow-by-blow recap and analysis – and surprising, sophisticated and thoughtful analyses. It’s enough to make you want to come back every week. Hey, her take on Saltburn alone was worth looking at, and she’s in there pitching almost every Saturday.
These days she has a lot of channels and she’d doing a lot of stuff In fact she’s co-hosting a new entertainment interview podcast as well, Connect the Dots, with music executive Shawn Pecas Costner. Anyway: the easiest way to learn about her is just to search out her channel on YouTube – that’s Kennie with an IE, and J.D. as in Jane Darcy – no, that’s not her name, I have no idea what her name is. If you like bold, brassy, big laughers with something to say and almost no filter at all, you’ll enjoy her, in at least one – or more! — of her many incarnations.. Kennie J.D. In fact, it bein’ Friday and all, she’ll probably have something new up on her feed tomorrow, so .. .check it out.
