Web Video / Crash Thompson

"I'm Crash Thompson, and remember: the only opinion that really matters is your own. Cheers."

Crash Thompson (formerly known as The Rock Critic) is a YouTube music review and comedy channel, running since August 2012.

As the channel's original name implies, it mainly focused on rock music, as well as adjacent genres such as metal, alternative, and the occasional foray into pop (provided the artist in question either has or at some point in their career has had some sort of rock influence), but that rule has since become null by the time he dropped The Rock Critic persona in favor of reviewing albums of all genres. The channel consists of full-length videos that delve into a specific album by a notable rock band - usually one that stands out sharply from the band's other output in some way, be it in sound or critical reception - in detail, lengthy retrospectives that cover the entire careers of bands across multiple full-length videos (The Rise And Fall Of Weezer and the Green Day Retrospective), "Quickies" which were shorter videos that cover then-recently released albums with Crash talking over footage of the band in question accompanied by brief visual gags , year-end lists of the best and worst albums of the preceding year, other series like Bad Album Covers and I Love This Song / I Hate This Song, all three of which are pretty self-explanatory, and a smattering of livestreams, Q&A videos, and subscriber specials, the three of which often overlap. However, he has since retired the "Quickies"/new release reviews for a number of reasons (specifically, mental health issues and not having enough time to fully form an opinion on an album by the time it just recently gets released).

He also previously had a second series called Game & Crash (formerly hosted on its own second channel before being moved to the main channel for the remainder of its run) wherein he talks about video games.

He is one of the four online music critics making up the Rock Coliseum collective, alongside ringleader Luke Spencer of Rocked, Mark Grondin of Spectrum Pulse, and Jon Compton of ARTV, who do a regular livestream game of voting bands and albums selected by the chat to “live” or “die” (the latter in some creative and thematically ironic way) in a coliseum setting, as well as doing podcasts and attending events such as music festival Sonic Temple together.

He's also one of the original four commentators behind One Crazy Weekend, a wrestling podcast chronicling the many, many wrestling shows that occurred over Wrestlemania weekend of 2019, but had to leave the podcast due to scheduling conflicts.

His channel can be found here, and his Twitter here.

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Tropes:

• Anything but That!: In the pilot episode, Crash hears a distant, familiar detuned guitar riff coming from his vinyl collection, and he goes in to investigate. He looks through his records to find that the music is coming from a CD: St. Anger by Metallica. The CD knocks him to the floor and starts bearing down on his face, and Crash screams, "No, not you! Anything but you!!"
• April Fools' Day: For 2023, the FIMI format came back. Except it wasn't a joke, with said new episode being available for Patreon subscribers.^note It was also quietly posted in the "FIMI" playlist of Crash' channel, but as "Unlisted".
• Arch-Enemy: When Crash reveals that Andy Gill produced the Red Hot Chili Peppers' debut album, he observes:
  Crash: Oh my God, Andy Gill is slowly becoming my arch-nemesis on this channel, and the motherfucker's been dead for two years!
• Author Appeal: References to The Simpsons and Dragon Ball Z.
• Bait-and-Switch: At the end of his Worst Albums of 2021 video, he reveals the #1 spot to be occupied by Van Weezer... only for him to pause and say, "Nah, I'm just fuckin' with you".
• Bias Steamroller: To put it simply, Crash absolutely despises Imagine Dragons, and it's a rare review that goes by without him saying something bad about them.
• Blasting Time: Has been shown to use this in his review of Bad Religion's Into the Unknown.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: During Bad Album Covers Vol. 1, Crash admits he likes the cover for Renaissance by the Village People, calling it "awesome", "gay", and "awesomely gay".
• Broke the Rating Scale: Every available category, up to and including Refusal To Rate.
  • Hitting the limit: A few albums have ranked 0.5/5, suggesting there was a possible 0, but no album was ranked so lowly—until his Worst Of 2019. There, in a fearsome "The Reason You Suck" Speech, he gave his first 0/5 to the Nostalgia Critic's parody of The Wall.
  • Out of bounds: Played for Laughs in the Attitude City review, where he gives it a billion out of five (the actual rating was a four out of five)
  • Meaningless Comparison: Quite often in his reviews, including fire extinguishers for In Flames, Lisa Frank folders for 5 Seconds of Summer'', and dead memes for tool.
  • Meaningless Value "One More Light gets COMPLETE FUCKING DARKNESS...out of 5!"
    For real though, 0.5/5. Seriously, fuck this noise.
    • Crash gives The Terror by the Flaming Lips a "zibbledygorp out of zook".
    • Also: in his 2020 Quarter 1 FIMI, he rated Mixing Colors by Roger Eno and Brian Eno as "Zzz/5"
    • In his Quarter 2 FIMI, he rated Yum Yum's Lure by Insane Clown Posse with "Drink Faygo/Eat Shit/Be Crimes/Forever".
  • Impossible To Rate: In his 2020 Quarter 3 FIMI, he reacted to Will Woods' The Normal Album with "Huh?/5"
  • Refusal To Rate: In his 2020 Quarter 2 FIMI, he flat-out refused to review Goodness, Gracious by Back Up Kid on the grounds that Back Up Kid wasn't a professional musician and was too small an act to subject to scrutiny. Crash then expressed his annoyance and even anger at people who requested reviews for hobbyists and musicians who just wanted to have fun, and stated that acts had to at least have 400 monthly viewers on Spotify to be reviewed. Otherwise, he'd veto the request. He then stated he did enjoy the album and gave Back Up Kid some encouragement.
• Broken Pedestal: Like many online reviewers, he once cited Doug Walker as an influence. Now, he never wants to turn out like him.
• Broken Record: In his "Top 10 Worst Rock Hits of 2006" list, he calls out his #2 pick, "Move" by Thousand Foot Krutch, on this:
  Crash: Not to mention, this song is just so fucking repetitive. They repeat this line in the chorus^note When you step into the circle and shake like we do like, fifty times. I swear to God, I have heard (in mocking tone) "sTeP iNtO tHe cIrClE aNd sHaKe lIkE wE dO" so many fucking times, if you carve open my skull, you will find that line tattooed on one of the folds of my cerebellum.
• The Cameo:
  • In Bad Album Covers, Vol. 2, Luke Spencer, the Horror Guru, and Yomarz appear on a brief game show sketch to earn points by thinking up many dick innuendos in twenty seconds for an album cover with the title 'My Lips Are For Blowing'.
  • Crash calls up Satanic Jackula on Skype in Bad Album Covers, Vol. 3 to make fun of how his face paint matches the face paint of a band in a bad album cover.
    • Satanic Jackula interrupts Crash's Metal Gear Solid parody, calling him on the 'Codec', to complain to him about sending over a package of exploding gorilla shit. While Crash coyly denies he sent it, Satanic Jackula knows he did because the package has a giant note written in crayon that says 'SAIYANS RULE! WEIRD SKULLFACE GUYS DROOL', with a badly drawn crayon cartoon of Crash as a Super Saiyan and Satanic Jackula's face behind a circle-backslash symbol.
    • Satanic Jackula appears again briefly, frustrated that he missed the Great Snatch.
    • Finally, Count Jackula himself appears to avenge Satanic Jackula by using Satanic magic to drop multiple anvils on top of Crash's head, even more so after Crash goes Super Saiyan.
  • The Horror Guru sent a missile after Crash in his video review of Red Hot Chili Peppers' One Hot Minute album, because he didn't give a good review to Five Finger Death Punch's album, Got Your Six.
    • Apparently in the same review, Guru sent another missile to Luke Spencer for the exact same reason. Unfortunately, Crash was too late when he called to warn him.
    • Then Il Neige, ARTV, Mark of Spin It! Reviews, Some Jerk with a Camera, Calluna, and Lil' D.Va appear in the review to work out the meaning of the confusing 'I Am You Are Me' verse of Red Hot Chili Peppers' One Big Mob song along with Crash. Jerk's cameo ends when the missile Crash knocked back with a baseball bat ends up temporarily destroying Disneyland.
    • Jerk returns to call Crash to ask him what he did to the missile, not mentioning Disneyland temporarily (though seemingly permanently) turning into a fiery post-apocalyptic version of itself because of it.
  • In the first episode of The Green Day Retrospective, ARTV appeared to throw rocks at Crash and make him build up Dookie because it's Crash's job and it has already taken Crash too long to get the retrospective started while it only took ARTV two months to review Green Day's entire discography.
    • Some Jerk with a Camera then appears, confused and infuriated that Green Day would turn down a free trip to Disneyland by a record label. Jerk silently grew angrier as Crash admitted he would turn down free Disneyland as well and would rather go to Universal Studios.
  • The Dom appears in QUICKIES!: Catch-Up Quickie #8 - Gotta Ketch 'Em Up to stop Crash's bad fake British accent.
  • In the second episode of the Green Day Retrospective, Lil' D.Va called up Diamanda Hagan on Skype to ask her if she knows anyone who can kill a Saiyan and then explains to Hagan why she needs Crash to be dead.
  • There's plenty on the third episode of the Green Day Retrospective. Because of a hysterical fit induced figuratively and literally by ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, and ¡Tré!, Crash calls up The Dom and Calluna to tell them they have more subscribers than ¡Tré! sold on its opening week. They notice something is wrong with him and make a few phone calls. They got Crash's friend Nathaniel to give him some advice.
    • After recovering from his depressed state, he fights the eldritch abomination/amalgamation of the living albums (voiced by Il Neige), alongside Lil' D.Va, Nathaniel, and Conner and Lucas from the Geekery Collective.
    • When they failed, Crash creates a Spite Bomb made from the negative energy of numerous submitted cameos of both fans and reviewers, including reviewers The Happy Spaceman, Rosen Hacker, and Magnetrex.
  • Crash's Top Ten Worst Pitchfork Reviews has cameos from Mark of Spectrum Pulse, Luke of Rocked Reviews and viralrak, respectively covering the fourth, third and second entries on the list.
• Casual Time Travel: How Past Crash traveled to the 'future' to meet Present Crash.
• Cliffhanger: The second episode of the Green Day Retrospective ends with Lil' D.Va shooting Crash. Resolved in the next episode (it didn't work).
• Cluster F-Bomb: Crash is known to be quite the colorful curser. He has once confirmed in a TikTok that his reason why he swears so much in his videos is to "make up for lost time" since he was raised in a Christian household where all forms of cursing were banned, with the ultimate exception of the "F-word" (no, not "fuck," the other one). He also joked in the video that that rule became an ironic turn of events in light of him eventually coming out as bisexual.
• Content Warnings: Appears occasionally at the beginning of his videos, including the How to Get Into Pearl Jam episode (which discusses suicide, self-harm, violence, and interpersonal abuse) and the I Love This Song episode for "Poker Face" (which includes references to slurs and violence against LGBTQ+ people, flashing strobe lights in the footage of Gaga's performances, and a brief mention of sexual abuse when he compares how "I Kissed A Girl" by Katy Perry doesn't hold up as well as "Poker Face", mainly due to the ick factor of how disgraced producer Dr. Luke co-wrote the song).
• Country Matters: Delivers a very blunt one towards King 810's La Petit Mort or A Conversation With God.
• Curse Cut Short:
  • In Top 10 Worst Pitchfork Reviews, Crash lists off several examples of Pitchfork giving punk albums low scores, including The Process of Belief by Bad Religion. When he sees it, he stops, zooms in on the score... and then shows the album cover on his backdrop... and then shows that he had the cover tattooed on his right arm. He then screams, "OH, YOU MOTHERF-!!!!!"
  • Happens again a few minutes later, where the reviewer describes a snare drum as "self-righteous";
    "I WANT ONE THOUSAND WORDS ON HOW A SNARE DRUM CAN BE SELF-RIGHTEOUS, YOU SELF-AGGRANDIZING TWA-"
• Damned by Faint Praise: He does try to be fair and give a compliment if an album really does deserve one.
• Dead Horse Genre: Invoked by name at the start of Top 10 Best Nu-Metal Bands.
  "And you know, there's no better way to get back to basics than to do... what pretty much every internet reviewer is known for doing."
  *Beat*
  "BEATING A DEAD HORSE! HOLY FUCK, DID NU-METAL SUCK ASS!"
• Despair Event Horizon: Crash crosses it big time towards the end of his Green Day Retrospective 3 video, to the point where he flat-out abandons Lil' D.Va when things look most bleak and goes to drown his sorrows at a coffee shop. Thankfully, through the encouragement of one of his friends, he gets better.
• Don't Shoot the Message: A bizarre, In-Universe variant occurs in his 'Top 10 Worst Pitchfork Reviews', discussing their original 2000 review of Kid A by Radiohead. While Crash absolutely believes the album is a '10 out of 10' like the review claims, the bewildering, often incoherent, excessive, and unsettling way the review discusses the album (one notable passage compares the experience to a stillborn child) almost manages to make the album seem unappealing.
• Facepalm: Frequently. Never a good sign. For example, his 2020 Quarter 2 FIMI segment where he talks about Jeff Rosenstock's No Dream, he starts out with a facepalm, does a double facepalm, then goes on a rant about how he simply does not care for nor about this fellow's music.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • In the 2000 Subscribers Special Q&A, Crash answers a question asking about doing another "Rise and Fall" video after "The Rise and Fall of Weezer". He mentions that he has no immediate plans, but does hope to revisit the format someday, and says that he has one particular band in mind. A poster with a heart-shaped hand grenade flashes by on the screen, foreshadowing the Green Day Retrospective.
  • In "Bad Album Covers No. 2", Crash talks about the cover for Waking and Dreaming by Orleans, which features the band members shirtless and standing together with their arms over their shoulders. He then remarks that it's not that bad of a cover, that some people have an aversion to shirtless pics of men, and then remarks that he will never.... ever... submit the audience to a shirtless pic of him. A shirtless pic of Crash flexing flashes on screen for a split second, along with a caption telling the audience "You brought this on yourself."
• Freudian Slip:
  • He would've danced around in nothing but a tube sock after talking about his love for Red Hot Chili Peppers, but he couldn't find a sock small- LARGE...enough.
  • He namechecks two of the tracks on A Moon-Shaped Pool as "Desert Island D'yuck" and "D'yucks Dark".
• The Gadfly: To Satanic Jackula.
• Genre Mashup: He ends up trying to describe Igorrr as, "Death-Black-Metalcore-Throat Singing-Baroque-Industrial-EDM-Euro Folk-Harpsichord-Slamdance".
• A Good Name for a Rock Band: In-Universe. During the "Green Day Retrospective", while discussing their first live album, Bullet in a Bible, Crash remarks that "Bullet in a Bible" would have been a great name for a band (let alone an album), and that he would have gladly used it if Green Day hadn't claimed it first.
• Human Aliens: Crash is a Saiyan.
• Hyper-Competent Sidekick: Lil' (or Gremlin) D.Va.
  Lil' D.Va: You know, I'm the only one here who has experience in flying and operating high tech machinery, why the hell do you get to be the captain?!
• Hypocritical Humor: Crash does a voice-over rant about Starbucks and their over-priced water-downed soy milk chai lattes in his review of One Hot Minute, then the video interrupts and cuts to Crash enjoying a soy milk Starbucks drink right before he drops it as he realizes his viewers are seeing him drink it.
• I Hate Past Me:
  • First invoked in the "Rise And Fall Of Weezer" episode on Make Believe, where he shudders at his past self's fandom of Seether after flashing back to his college days. Said past incarnation of Crash and his quintessentially 2000's "angsty" taste in fashion and music would become a recurring theme on the channel, coming to a head when Past Crash would travel to the present and this trope would be a central plot point of "Top 10 Best Nu-Metal Bands".
  • In the "How To Get Into Bad Religion" episode, he brings up his old Into the Unknown review where he delivers this line about how cringe-worthy and dated the jokes in his old reviews used to be (and briefly averts The Bin as a result):
    Past Crash: (with "spooky" makeup and a demonic voice) I speak of none other...than the vile...the contemptous...the bane of insanity—
    Crash: Oh, stop that! Stop that, you cringey little fuck! Channel Awesome is never going to hire you, and believe me, homie, you dodged a bullet with that one!
  • This was also discussed in a TikTok he made when asked which one of his old Rock Critic videos he felt was his best, and which one he felt was his worst. The one he enjoyed the most went to "Top 10 Best Nu-Metal Bands," as he thought that, as cringeworthy as the storylines and skits may be, he thought that they actually did add to the review, even though he was admitting there were questionable takes he made here and there (namely, that he put Taproot on there, let alone putting them above Slipknot). The worst, he felt, was "The Rise and Fall of Weezer" series, as he thought they no longer reflected how he feels about Weezer (see Tear-jerker) and how the dated humor and emphasis on skits and storylines were a little "Channel Awesome-y" in places, so much so that he even tried deleting the whole series from his channel at times.
• I'm Okay!: Crash says this in the pilot (the St. Anger review).
• In the Style of: Crash's 500 subscriber special, a review of "Back to the Shack" by Weezer, is done in the style of Todd in the Shadows.
• Insult to Rocks: In "Worst Albums of 2022", Crash compares the lyrics from "Emo Girl" by Machine Gun Kelly to Bratz dolls, before going on to say "that's not fair to the Bratz dolls".
• Interrupted by the End: At the end of the I Hate This Song Episode for "Poets" by The Tragically Hip, Crash plays a clip of the Hip's guest appearance on Corner Gas, which starred Canadian comedian and actor Brent Butt. Crash then starts snickering (a la Beavis And Butthead) at Butt's last name, and then says "I have to think of something more clever, I can't end the video like thi-" before getting cut off by a title card that reads "The End".
• It's Personal:
  • When it comes to the end of Hurley off The Rise and Fall of Weezer, Crash makes it clear the reason he reviewed the albums up to this point was because of how disappointed he was at Weezer becoming a shell of it's former self and not even with Hurley's okay reception was redeeming a band he once loved dearly.
  • In "Top Ten Worst Pitchfork Reviews", Crash states that he plans to be as neutral and objective as possible, but then breaks his rule twice - once for So Jealous by Tegan & Sara, and again for 9 by Damien Rice.
  • In his review/breakdown of One Hot Minute, one of the reasons that Crash feels obligated to defend the album is because he endured a miserable childhood in a fundamentalist Christian household, and the song "Shallow Be Thy Game" (which criticizes organized religion) brought him "a lot of comfort and reassurance in what I would call one of my darkest times".
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Invoked as a primary criticism of 21st Century Breakdown, having reviewed the album's predecessor in great detail immediately beforehand.
• Jaw Drop: In his "Top 10 Worst Pitchfork Reviews" video, a particularly insane passage from their Kid A review that involves a stillborn child leaves Crash in slack-jawed shock.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • In the Dishonorable Mentions section of "The Top 10 Worst Pitchfork Reviews", Crash mentions their review of Jet's Shine On, which features a link to a YouTube video of a monkey urinating in its own mouth. The only reason he gives it a dishonorable mention is because... "they're not wrong".
  • Similarly, when discussing Jason Josephes' review of Zaireeka by the Flaming Lips, Crash does concede that the album's format (four CDs that have to be played at the same time on four individual CD players) is a demanding ask for an album, and that it can negatively affect the album's score. However, he then goes on to criticize Josephes for giving the album a 0.0 after Josephes stated in the review that he did not even attempt to play all four CDs at once; Crash also criticizes Josephes for taking "unnecessary potshots" at the Flaming Lips fanbase, particularly after reading a line stating that Flaming Lips fans spend their money on "inhalants and detox".
• Lampshade Hanging: Crash is now aware he has a TV Tropes page and has lampshaded at least two of the tropes found on this page.
• Lampshaded the Obscure Reference: During his review of Kamelot's "The Shadow Theory", he mentions that he found out about Kamelot through a PMRants video.
  Crash: God, this has to be the most obscure reference I've ever made.
• Large Ham: The screaming he lets out at times should tell ya otherwise.
• Left Hanging: Who did Diamanda Hagan recommend to Lil' D.Va to kill Crash and where were they?
• Left It In: In "The Worst Rock Hits Of 1990", while talking about "Me and Elvis" by Human Radio, Crash emphasizes the song's overt worship of Elvis Presley by making handjob motions and saying "Get over here, King!" He then turns to the camera and says, "This is the worst thing I've ever done on camera. I should not leave this in the final t-"
• Lighter and Softer: Like many other YouTube music critics not named Todd in the Shadows, he has done his part to focus less on negative reviews, especially following the 2020 rebranding. However, in cases such as Glenn Danzig's Elvis Presley covers album, he can't help it.
• Network Decay: In the Bloodhound Gang episode of "I Love This Song", Crash makes fun of how unintentionally dated the chorus of "The Bad Touch" ("You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals, so let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel") has become since the Discovery Channel has since moved away from nature and science programming to docudramas and reality TV. invoked
• The Nicknamer: invoked Whenever an album has a ridiculously long or vague-to-pronounce title, Crash would just nickname it with a shorter regular name like Davy^*For Rob Zombie's The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser, Chris^*For Green Day's 1039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours, or Andy^*For A Lot Like Birds' Divisi.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer:
  • During his I Love This Song episode on "The Bad Touch" by Bloodhound Gang, to show the audience how insipid the band's music is, he lists several of their song titles, including "The Evils of Placenta Hustling", "Kiss Me Where It Smells Funny", and "Diarrhea... It Runs in the Family". A caption appears on screen, stating: "These are all REAL Bloodhound Gang songs".
  • Also happens in Top 10 Worst Rock Hits of 1990, where Crash lists off several bands that sound fake (Diving for Pearls, Lord Tracy, Havana Black, Little Caesar, Sleeze Beez, and The Hooters) but were actually real bands that had success on the rock charts in the 1990s.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Whenever he talks about growing up in a fundamentalist Christian church and about being a suicide survivor.
• Out-of-Genre Experience: During The Rock Critic era, Crash brings this up whenever he tackles a genre outside of his jurisdiction. It ended up happening so often that it became one of the primary reasons for his channel rebranding.
• Parody Displacement: Invoked in Curse of the Best New Artist Grammy (1995-1999): when Crash brings up the Crash Test Dummies and plays a clip of "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm", Crash says "God, I bet more people remember the Weird Al version these days".
• Persona Non Grata: In April 2020, during his first FIMI of the year, he introduced The Bin, into which he consigns bands and artists he never wants to talk about again, whether it be for a personal hatred of the music or for contentious acts he doesn't want to mention. The list^note which is incomplete; the full version is only available on Crash's private Discord server of bands/artists that were publicly revealed to be in The Bin was as follows: Five Finger Death Punch^note Binned for persistently poor output, but later released an anti-mask music video that reinforced their Binning and made Crash even harsher on the album that got them Binned, Attila, Backwordz, Brand New, Trapt, All That Remains, King 810, As I Lay Dying, Lostprophets, Blood on the Dance Floor, Ted Nugent, Doug Walker (and Channel Awesome in general), 6ix9ine, Chris Brown, Dr. Luke, Vektor, Burzum, McCafferty, Marilyn Manson, Bad Wolves, Azealia Banks, Razorfist/TheRageaholic, Emmure, Iced Earth (and any other bands Jon Schaffer is in), Ariel Pink, John Maus, Psychosexual/Psycho Synner, Tom MacDonald, Mumford & Sons, Skillet, Kid Rock, AJR, Maroon 5 and Weezer^note Though technically not true, as Crash confirmed that he just doesn't have any good reason to care anymore about Weezer, and they're only Binned on a technical level. He also talked in videos about being very close to possibly binning Asking Alexandria and Kings of Leon. In March 2023, Crash mentioned on Patreon that he retired The Bin, noting that he introduced it as a way to prevent him from having to cover either troll requests or boring, bland artists that gave him nothing to talk about, even though he does clarify that if he doesn't feel like talking about an artist or giving them any attention, he isn't going to.
• Production Foreshadowing: Quite a lot of brief foreshadowing for his Games & Crash spinoff channel and the Green Day Retrospective in his One Hot Minute review.
  • Crash also foreshadows the Green Day Retrospective in his 2k Subscriber Special (see Freeze-Frame Bonus).
  • Within the Green Day Retrospective itself, Crash complains about Pitchfork's antagonistically contrarian reviews in Pt. 1, foreshadowing the Top 10 Worst Pitchfork Reviews video.
  • In the review for Into the Unknown by Bad Religion, Crash references the (unrelated) Godsmack song "Bad Religion", which he despises; he made an I Hate This Song episode about the song "Bad Religion" four years later. Crash later said in the commentary track for ''Into the Unknown" that he had been planning to do the episode since 2016, but the idea got stuck in Development Hell.
  • In the How To Get Into The Tragically Hip episode, Crash briefly talks about how mainstream rock was in a particularly bad headspace in the years before the Grunge and Alternative Rock explosion, particularly the year 1990. Two years later, Crash would release Top 10 Worst Hits of 1990.
• Proud to Be a Geek: Cited as a large part of why Crash loves early, Blue Album-era Weezer so much, specifically the track "In The Garage".
• Rudely Hanging Up: Crash does this to Lil D'va in Pt. 1 of the Green Day Retrospective after she questions why he is the captain of their starship despite her having more experience with spacecraft.
• Running Gag:
  • "The Problem", whenever Crash considers the possibility that It's the Same, So It Sucks will be invoked, when discussing bands that have one specific approach to songcrafting that they stuck to throughout their career.
  • "The Imagine Dragon", whenever a band jumps on the trend of filing off their normal sound in favour of forgettable electronica.
  • Referring to the year 2018 as "I lived, bitch" during his Worst of 2018 list.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Pretty much what Lil' D.Va does when Crash reveals Warning is his absolute personal favorite Green Day album, which is supposed to be his most despised so they wouldn't receive massive amounts of hater comments.
  • Crash's response to the animate faces of the Green Day trilogy albums revealing themselves to be the cause of the impending apocalypse. At least at first.
• Script Swap: In "Best and Worst Albums of 2016", when introducing the number one spot for Best Album, Crash goes into a lengthy interlude repeating the words "butt" and "booty". He then stops and yells, "Hey, wait a minute. Hey, who swapped out the pages of my script?!". On cue, Lil D'Va appears on screen and laughs.
  Crash: Goddammit, D'Va!!!!
• Self-Deprecation: Appears often, though normally feels to be from a place of genuine humbleness.
• Sensory Abuse:
  • Both referenced and invoked in his review of Terminal Redux. Crash's biggest gripe with the album comes from David DiSanto's vocal style, and he illustrates this with a high-pitched whine during the review.
  • Eventually, once Vektor ended up being put in the Bin in light of DiSanto's domestic abuse allegations, Crash mentioned that even regardless of the allegations, DiSanto's voice was already a "medical issue" for him to begin with so he had no reason to even want to care about them anymore.
• Shared Universe: Because of Crash's various cameos, mainly for/with Channel Awesome reviewers, the show is part of the Reviewaverse.
• Shout-Out:
  • Mainly to memes.
    Satanic Jackula: Why does anyone watch you?!
    Crash: Dank memes, BITCH!
    Suddenly surrounded by flashing and noisy memes while his expression remains.
  • The entire first few minutes of "Green Day Retrospective: Part 2" has Li'l D.Va doing a beat-for-beat reinterpretation of The Filthy Frank Show as a cover for an attempt to assassinate Crash before he destroys the city.
  • Tends to occasionally pronounce the word "Dick" as "D'yuck", such as in his review of A Moon-Shaped Pool.
  • In the Danzig Sings Elvis review, Crash introduces himself with "Hey-oh, people, I'm Crash Thompson, and welcome... to my nightmare."
  • When lamenting the fall from grace of Pale Waves' second album, Crash changes location and sings "The Crash Wrong Song".
• Significant Wardrobe Shift:
  • At the end of his Best And Worst Albums of 2015 video, Crash retired his fedora he'd been wearing since the start of the channel, to be replaced by a black beanie, along with a denim vest with band buttons and patches. Crash hated the fedora for years and wishes he'd made the change a lot sooner.
  • Following the "WE'RE REBRANDING" video, Crash discusses how he was also dropping the denims vest as well, stating that the current lighting he uses for videos makes using it rather difficult due to the heat.
• Signing Off Catchphrase: "I'm Crash Thompson, and remember: the only opinion that really matters is your own. Cheers." Although he's begun to drop the catchphrase due to wanting to drop the usage of "cliches" on his content.
• Spin-Off:
  • Critical Condition, his series on MetalSucks where he reviewed specifically metal albums. The series ended in 2016 due to Crash's packed schedule, although he did briefly come back in May 2017 for a one-off episode on Danzig's Black Laden Crown, the follow-up to Crash's pick for Worst Album of 2015.
  • Game & Crash, his second channel dedicated to video games.
• Squee: Whenever he finds a camp or a 'gay' album cover, which has always happened in his three Bad Album Covers videos.
• Story Arc: Starts at the end of the first episode of the Green Day Retrospective, and ends with the third episode:
  • Turns out Lil' D.Va was from the future, sent to the past by the South Korean armed forces to stop Indianapolis from blowing up later in 2017. According to Lil' D.Va, the aftermath of the explosion will destroy the country and then eventually the world. Lil' D.Va only estimated Crash will be the cause since his Super Saiyan mode in his review of Raditude actually destroyed an entire city block, and it's more than likely that a bigger reaction to Green Day's worst albums will cause The End of the World as We Know It. But she was actually wrong, Crash wasn't exactly the cause. He wasn't powerful enough, even at his strongest, to destroy the world.
  • It turns out that the living albums, ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, and ¡Tré!, were behind it all. They were using Crash as a conduit to drain power from him while he talks about them, in order to be capable of regeneration and destroy the world to rebuild it in their image. Crash didn't fight them straight away alongside Lil' Diva because he was in a depressed state and unable to care, instead he left. After he recovered, he fights an eldritch tentacled fusion of the living albums with his Saiyan powers, alongside Lil' D.Va in a mech, his friend Nathaniel with a baseball, and Conner and Lucas from The Geekery Collective (both have light sabers, additionally Conner has a sword and Lucas has an axe). When they failed, after an unseen fight with kung-fu, light saber battles, explosions, and fire breathing hookers, Lil' D.Va, Nathaniel, Conner, and Lucas stall the albums. Crash flies up and summons a Spite Bomb from the negative energy of people pissed off at the mediocrity of the albums. He drops it down on the albums, but he ran out of energy to ignite the bomb and destroy the albums. Until Lil' D.Va flies in and crashes into the albums. She ignited the bomb with her ultimate and destroyed the albums, thus preventing the apocalypse and completing her mission.
• Suddenly Shouting: From his review of Girl Band's Early Years EP:
  "...if the album they release next month sounds anything like this EP...then...how can I put this...FUCKING BURN EVERYTHING! AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
• Super Mode:
  • Transforming into his Super Saiyan form to destroy Raditude in his rage at the end of the Rise And Fall Of Weezer episode on said album.
  • He tried to again when he faced Count Jackula in the third volume of his Bad Album Covers videos...until he got smashed multiple times by Count Jackula's satanic anvil spell.
• Super-Strength: Sent a missile flying back...with a baseball bat. Done quite casually actually.
• Super-Toughness: Lil' D.Va tried to kill him with a grenade, then with a cannon, and then tried to drown him. Nothing works.
  "Even if you were here, I'm Saiyan, y'know. Bullets don't even really hurt me that much."
• Take a Third Option: When reviewing Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino by Arctic Monkeys, Crash notes that the album had split the fanbase in two, with both the album's fans and haters expecting Crash to validate their opinions. Crash instead decides to "vote third party", ultimately giving credit to the album's lyrics while criticizing the music for being one-note and boring.
• Take That!: To overrated albums and hater/troll commenters.
• Tempting Fate: In "CURSE of the Best New Artist (1995-1999)", when covering 1998's Best New Artist nominations, Crash notes that that year was the first year Gangsta Rap got some real representation in that category, and hopes that someone good will carry the torch... only for it to end up being Puff Daddy, with Crash facepalming and proclaiming "Fuck you, Grammys. Just, just fuck you".
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • Most notably near the end of his Top 10 Best Nu-Metal Bands video, delivered directly to his "past self" and indirectly to the genre itself:
    Present Crash: Dude, there is just... there is no way I could've been this stupid growing up. There just isn't! Like, I'm sorry, but you are a fucking dumbass. There is seriously something very wrong with you.
    Past Crash: We are literally the same- (person)
    Present Crash: NO WE ARE NOT THE SAME! I grew up! I matured! I moved past all this bullshit!
    Look, you've shown us some decent nu-metal bands here today - hell, some were actually really good, and probably do deserve more credit. But look at the damage this genre did as a whole. It blurred everything. By mixing all of these different genres together and doing it so half-assedly and lackluster, it just... resulted in this deluge of bland, boring, unbelievably insubstantial bands. Mediocre at everything, excelling in nothing. There may have been a few bands that went against that trend and got the recipe right, but for every nu-metal or alt-metal or whatever you wanna call it that did get it right, fifteen got it wrong. And these assholes completely clogged the market. The image of the angry, pissy, spoiled white boy became synonymous with the rock and metal image itself. That's what nu-metal did. Nu-metal made us look bad.
    Nu-metal spoiled us rotten! And as a result... people fled.
    People left rock and metal in droves. People got sick of listening to someone bitch about their bullshit problems, when they already had plenty of problems to deal with in their own lives. They got sick of the samey, ceaselessly repeating melodies and hooks, they got sick of the mealey-mouthed, soulless, personality-less drones creating generic product after generic product after generic, pandering, useless, empty product!
    Nu-metal hurt us in ways that we're still trying to recover from, even today, rocker and metalhead alike, and... the fact that you would put one of the best bands in the freaking world on this list... it just blows my freaking mind. What is your fucking malfunction!?
  • This was immediately counteracted by his past self, which his present self took to heart and in turn delivered a more optimistic Rousing Speech to close out the episode.
  • He ends his review of The Order Of Things with one of these directed at frontman Philip Labonte, which turns out to be lyrics from the next album he's about to review, Sturm Und Drang.
  • His video on the Top 10 worst Pitchfork reviews has Crash unloading on the website's snobbish elitism after a bitter, nonsensical review of Lateralus:
    Crash: It’s what kills a lot of Pitchfork’s reviews, and even a lot of their non-review related content. Just…the contempt. Absolute, searing contempt…for the artist, for the audience, for their own fucking readers! This goddamn website has such a bad habit of telling people how small and insignificant and stupid they are to be a part of something, or to want to be a part of something. And this review in particular is just dripping with that kind of hostile, absolutely disgusting contempt. It’s gatekeeping of the absolute worst kind, and its only real purpose is to make you feel bad, feel lesser, feel out of the loop. WE. ARE. BETTER. THAN. YOU.
  • An opus-length speech comprises the entirety of the number 1 entry for Crash's worst album of 2019, directed at The Nostalgia Critic and his musical review of The Wall. It gets vitriolic enough to (at least narratively) spur on Crash dropping the "Rock Critic" branding at the end.
  • Gives one to Five Finger Death Punch for their music video of "Living the Dream" in his Top 10 Worst Albums of 2020 video, criticizing them for taking off their masks in the video and possibly causing the deaths of Americans from the coronavirus with the music video.
• Theme Naming: Crash often spots a recurring theme with a few of his yearly "Worst Of..." lists:
  • 2013: "You should know better."
  • 2014: "Who gave these sociopaths instruments?"
  • 2017: "What the fuck are YOU doing here?!"
  • 2018/I Lived, Bitch: The rampage of the Imagine Dragon
  • 2019: "Who is this even for?"
  • 2020: Stated in November of that year to be, "Oh yeah, that came out this year."
  • 2021: Disappointment
  • 2022: How the Mighty Have Fallen.
• Theme Tune: "Lexicon Devil" by The Germs, though he has since dropped this song following the rebrand due to repeated Content ID matches.
• This Is Gonna Suck: The cold open of his One More Light review:
  Crash: Jesus fucking Christ!
• Two-Hit Wonder: Discussed in Top Ten Two Hit Wonders, a list of 10 bands that only had two Top 40 hits on the Billboard Hot 100. invoked
• Viewer Pronunciation Confusion: invoked Sometimes struggles with the pronunciations of particularly foreign or oddly spelled names of bands and band members, more often than not leading him to apologize for any mispronunciations.
• Vocal Range Exceeded: In the St. Anger video, Crash complains about James Hetfield's attempts to sing out of his range (particularly on "Frantic"). He compares it to when he (Crash) tries to sing a song by The Used. Cue a Cutaway Gag where Crash is trying to sing "Buried Myself Alive" while making dinner; when he reaches the high scream in the chorus, the resulting scream is so loud and discordant that he falls to the floor.
  Crash: I'm Okay!
• Waxing Lyrical: During his massive, massive tirade against the ''Uno-Dos-Tre'' trilogy in his GDR 3 video, Crash lets loose:
  Crash: FOR I HAVE DINED ON HONEYDEW, AND DRUNK THE MILK OF WELCOME TO PARADISE!
• Wham Line:
  • An absolutely devastating one in his video about Chester Bennington's suicide:
    Crash: "...I put a loaded shotgun in my mouth and pulled the trigger. The only reason I'm still alive is because that gun misfired."
  • More of a Wham Shot but it still fits here: At the end of the WORST OF 2019 list after the tirade on Doug Walker's album/review of The Wall, the screen shows the "The Rock Critic" logo...only to then show 2012-2019...and then to reveal the re-branding as "Crash Thompson".
• Where No Parody Has Gone Before: Throughout the first episode of the Green Day Retrospective, Lil' D.Va as Scotty tries to ensure the 'spaceship' has enough power to repel the typical hater comments to his unexpected opinions of Green Day's early albums.
• World of Weirdness: Since the show is set in the Reviewaverse, weirdness is a natural part of the setting. For example, Crash not only being an alien, but a fictional alien species from an anime.
• Yuri Fan: Part of his love for Tegan & Sara.

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