I mean he tells you what the chords are and describes what you can already hear with your ears, like "here's a pad"...why do people find this worthwhile to listen to?
This 100%. The thing I like about his videos is that he decomposes songs into their individual pieces and lays them out to show you what they are. As a music loving non-musician, there are so many layers to songs that I never realized were there (did you know there were female vocals in Foo Fighters’ Everlong? I didn’t, until Rick showed me). Anyone looking for Rick to point at a specific thing and say “this is what makes this particular song great” is missing the point. He’s taking the song apart and showing you all of the different pieces that together make it a great song. You may not ever have noticed many of those elements before, but without them that song wouldn’t be as good.
Plus we all don't like the same thing. And we like the same things for different reasons.
Rick shows you the construction of songs that we all hear and he shows what went into the construction of a song. Some of it may be a guess some extremely precise.
He's also more musical than lyrical he's even said in some of his videos he can't dissect lyrics as he does music.
He's also in a contact battle with YouTube algorithms and DRM he's always getting blasted for a few seconds of music. I'm amazed that he has survived YouTube's idiotic controlling behaviour.
But he doesn't tell you how it was composed. It would actually be very difficult or impossible to explain how something was composed. That's why I'm confused. This video is like if someone tried to tell you "what makes this painting great" by pointing out the painting's objects and their colors.
His series should rather be called "Breaking Down This Song", because that's mostly what he does. He very rarely actually explains or gets into what actually makes the song (in his opinion) great. Most of the time it's just a slightly more advanced "reaction video", and those are much easier to make, I'm sure.
He's a musician giving us a tour of the song, which I enjoyed. He does explain why at 4:54.
Maybe drop your "fascination" with rejecting him and just listen you'd find it a simple enthusiast tour/lightweight music class, and appreciate it as nothing more.
