Vlogger and music critic Anthony Fantano's success as the world's biggest music critic is a remarkable achievement. But what effects do quality over quantity and internet celebrity have on music criticism?
Marcus accused Fantano of being racist and misogynistic, and linked him with the alt-right base of 4chan. It was by far one of the biggest failures of a journalistic expose I have ever witnessed. Not only did The FADER have to make several corrections of inaccurate quoting and blatantly wrong information, Marcus' logic was incoherent. In desperation to cancel Fantano, he resorted to petty ad hominems, edited statements to make him look bad, ripping them from their context, and blissfully ignorant to the fact that Fantano is a left-wing Bernie supporter. But there were some arguments against his content that Marcus glossed over, ones that are more concerned with the field of music criticism, which I hope to bring to light here.
As a teenager, I was fascinated by the albums he was promoting and how efficiently he conveyed his opinions on them. His vocabulary was accessible but expressive. On numerous occasions Fantano's reviews did change my mind on albums that I liked, loved, or even hated. However, since last year, and especially as of 2018, I've noticed a decline in terms of quality of his reviews. Currently, I find myself disappointed, as the articulation of his arguments are often amount to riffing, and he also seems to be more interested in entertaining his followers with shitposting. For the record, I have a lot of respect for him. He encouraged me to listen to a more diverse range of music, and he's undoubtedly pioneered a new format of music criticism through audio-visual means. However, I feel that the current direction he is taking encourages a discourse around music that leans towards reductive contrarianism, much like our unfortunate political reality.
The Old Fantano
As the Connecticut resident was starting up on YouTube, working at a pizza parlour to pay off student loans while running a podcast on his local radio station WNPR, the ways in which he engaged with album reviews were noticeably more written. Hearkening back to his earliest reviews, whilst they were admittedly awkward - with the "ums" and "errs", the mis-edits, the tinny sound quality - it is easy to tell that he wrote more expansive viewpoints that drew upon ideas that reference other works. Also the descriptions often came with a short paragraph summing up the thoughts he would go on to communicate in the review, like a little thesis. And most of the time this would come through in the content.
Two examples spring to my mind, the first one being his review of Tyler the Creator's Goblin. He begins the review, after a short joke segment poking fun at Tyler stans demanding that he gives it a positive score, saying this:
In the time between the Bastard review and today, I have felt every way you possibly could about Tyler the Creator: he's offensive, he's stupid, he's funny, he's terrible, he's nice, he's honest, he's a pre-Madonna, he's angry, he's perceptive, he's artistic, he's human. And like any human, he is all these things, and also like any human on the planet, he is flawed. He really let's that show in his music too, especially on Goblin, which tugs you in every emotional direction he can. Goblin is in a different place because Tyler is in a different place. In a very short amount of time Odd Future has been questioned or praised by tons of music blogs and magazines. [...] Of course this rush of fame will impact the creative process, Tyler lets it affect his art in the worst way possible.
A passage such as this is effective as an opening statement for a piece of writing. He contextualises where the artist is currently at in terms of public and personal reception, references his previous work, and gives the viewer a clear indication of what the overarching theme of the record is, and what his overall argument in relation to the album is. Agree or disagree, he presents a structured and clear argument, and continues with it across the course of the review. In the review of Lulu by Metallica & Lou Reed, there is a genuinely original analysis of the bemusing release. While other critics panned this bizarre collaboration with a stone-faced seriousness, Fantano offered a different perspective:
"I can't help but feel this album is a really great troll. It has to be on some level, it's just too perfect of a storm. Trolling people, tricking people, angering people on the Internet, is a real art. You can't be too obvious because you're not going to tick off anybody. If Metallica was to partake in a collaboration that would troll people, it would have to be a rock figure. It couldn't be Gucci Mane or Bjork, because people would cry foul. Lou Reed is one of the oldest, and oddest figures we have in rock music today who has some kind of mainstream appeal. But what band out there has a fanbase big enough, offendable enough, for him to prey on with some weird-ass poetry? Metallica. And the beauty of it is that on the reverse side, Metallica is a band that would piss off Lou Reed fans, because they're art-rock fans, they're above listening to a group like Metallica, they turn their nose up at that kind of stuff."
It's a genuinely clever and original observation that seemed to fly over every other critic's head: Lulu was a "fuck you" to their respective fanbases. Fantano conveys this clearly, and eloquently, which could be because he was writing a lot more for his radio show in this period. As his channel began to blow up, however, I feel that the quality of his content declined for two main reasons.
1. Quantity over Quality
An in-depth interview Fantano did with SPIN, told me a lot as to why his reviews have gone from somewhat creative, to flat-out formulaic. The writer described his reviewing style as "workmanlike". Music is an art, and art can often take time to grow or to wither in terms of how much merit you find in it. I understand that being the biggest critic in the world, Fantano must keep regularly upload to earn his living, and I applaud that his love for music is so eager that he feels that he must listen to and form a judgement on every song, album, and EP that's being released right now.
But here's the issue: you can't. Technically you can, but the consequences of that approach aren't of much academic quality. No one can possibly hold a well-read, well-considered, cultured opinion on absolutely every single piece of music that gets released, without exhausting yourself speechless. So a majority of his reviews now can essentially be boiled down to different variations of this: "this is what the production sounds like - I like that. This is what the lyrics were saying - I don't like that. I liked this song, but I didn't like this song." And so on and so forth. This is what happens when one attempts to juggle everything, the quality of their work dips, because they are just treating it like a job.
Fantano certainly loves his job, but when it comes to albums he does not see the value in on the first couple of listens, he dismisses it in the space of 2-30 seconds in a 'YUNOREVIEW' segment, because he has other things to be reviewing. Even the quality of his positive reviews has declined. Take the recent Jack White album. The grounds for a 9 out of 10 seems to be this for Fantano: it's experimental. That's it. It's so painfully basic, yet he seems convinced he's struck gold. Experimental music can suck too, just because it has the experimental label, does not make it inherently good. Fantano seems more occupied with quantity than quality.
Last year, he set up a second channel called fantano, after he took down his meme channel, thatistheplan, in the wake of The FADER allegations. Not only does he churn out around 14 videos a week, the videos are just meandering musings on stuff that's happening in the music world. He doesn't reply to his fans extensively in the comments like he did before, actually entertaining interesting counter-arguments. When he does interact with followers now, he either talks at them through a webcam, or in 140 characters or less.
2. Internet Celebrity
With popularity from a visual format, there has to be some level of entertainment value provided. I think as he The Needle Drop has grown over the years, Fantano's online presence has become more centred around entertaining people than giving them in-depth analysis. Reading a well-written article or listening to someone convey a convincing argument can provide entertainment, but this does not seem to be the entertainment that Fantano is concerned with anymore. Now, he entertains through his popular Internet personality, or in other words, his meme status.
Of course I'm not saying that critics should by no means have a joke. Pitchfork's review of Jet's Shine On consisted purely of a video of a monkey peeing into his own mouth, and even Fantano's review of Limp Bizkit's Gold Cobra, where he just ate food and drank smoothies for 6 minutes, are both hilarious. They're both a waste of time, much like the respective albums, and, more importantly, they are occasional. Everything Fantano posts now has some kind of meme involved, and it impedes on the reception of his content because followers now seem more interested in whether an album is "red flannel" or "yellow flannel".
There was one thing that Ezra Marcus was very right about: in accepting his meme status, he has appeared to pander to keyboard warriors on 4chan and YouTube. This doesn't make him an alt-right racist, obviously, rather someone who's Internet savvy. The videos he released on thatistheplan all veered towards average, low-brow, anti-'SJW' humour. Both the fans who follow The Needle Drop for the memes, and The Needle Drop himself can be negative influences on each other. The comment sections are often made up purely of different reincarnations of the same oversaturated jokes, so he just embraces it and feeds them with more meme material.
Often meme humour can be based on saying the opposite without elaboration for the sake of trying to be anti and cool, and this contrarianism is rife in Fantano's spheres of influence. This might be okay as an occasional joke, but when it is everywhere, it risks music criticism becoming more geared towards entertaining, rather than reasoning. In these respects, the trajectory of Fantano's channel demonstrate the negatives of celebrity music criticism. More attention becomes invested in the person, and divested from the details of his arguments.