The Receipt Keeper D'Angelo Wallace always knows how to cut through the chaos.

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW what’s going on with YouTubers or anybody else with a modicum of influence online, you’ve got two options. You can watch their videos and scour Instagram—or you can get thee to a YouTube drama channel. And no one does a channel quite like D’Angelo Wallace. The Texas-based 22-year-old packs his superlong explainer videos (many of them run over an hour) with timelines, charts, and commentary—a hybrid model that perfectly encapsulates the messiness of the influencers he covers. He now has more than 2.18 million subscribers. “I will say it’s not necessarily a case of me always striving to have the best research, or I’m always going to be 100 percent correct,” Wallace said. “I just am obsessed with the storytelling of it all.”

- MADISON MALONE KIRCHER

Your approach is different from that of most other YouTubers. Do you consider yourself a documentarian?

No. I will provide you with an objective narrative, but I will absolutely follow that up with my own opinion. I look at it as: Can I make the video about influencers partying during a pandemic? Can I make the summary video of the beauty community?

It feels a little like what traditional long-form magazine stories often do, which is take a few months to create the definitive story on a subject, the story everyone wants to read.

I read this 9,000-word article about the musician Gordon Lightfoot, and I’m not necessarily interested in the great voices of the ’70s, but from paragraph one, I was hooked. We didn’t need it, we didn’t ask for it, but it was very well done. It really reminded me of the energy I try to have with my videos.

How much YouTube do you sit through?

Before my videos go up, I’ve probably just been watching YouTube all day every day for the past week. I haven’t watched a YouTube video at normal speed in months. I think they’re all at 2x speed. Sometimes if it’s really, really long, I’ll download it and play it in my editing software at 4x speed.

A year into the pandemic, do you feel like internet drama is escapism?