Anthony Fantano: The Last Emperor

The cause and effect of being the world's most famous music reviewer

Dear reader, how are you?

Over the last 15 months, I’ve been thrust into the music commentary space, a timeline I far from expected for myself. Thrust being the operative word here, because you can really get f*cked by putting a word out of place and unintentionally upsetting a whole fanbase or community.

I am, for all intents and purposes, an inoffensive music content creator that steers clear of on-the-nose criticism. But even still, I have managed to offend more than enough people by having an opinion on the internet.

For example, my physical appearance and ethnicity was criticised because I named a genre wrong in a video (in the eyes of the commenter). And while the video has hundreds of thousands of “likes”, I still remember that hurtful comment and its 200 likes. At times, experiences such as these have been upsetting, but I am getting better at accepting that it’s part of the game. I don’t believe you develop thick skin more than you accept that humanity isn’t always pretty, that some people won’t understand your point and that criticism is the unfortunate byproduct of having mass publishing platforms such as TikTok and Instagram.

The above experience stayed with me for a while, but eventually I moved passed it. But what lingered was an idle thought about the most famous music critic on planet earth, Anthony Fantano and his YouTube channel The Needle Drop.

For those unfamiliar, Anthony Fantano is a 37 year old music critic and YouTuber from Connecticut. Starting his channel in 2009, he has reviewed thousands of albums, amassed millions of followers and is unquestionably the most famous music reviewer to have ever lived. I try not to be hyperbolic with my statements, but it’s hard to argue otherwise.

Last year, his divorce papers were uncovered by a nosy internet troll. The divorce was even trending on Twitter. This information, while on the public record, is something that he definitely did not want out in the world. Abhorrent and despicable, when I read the news, my jaw was left so wide open that the inside of my cheeks dried. A music reviewer, of all things, getting doxxed? Questions swirled around my head:

“How did we get here - to have a much lauded and loathed music monolith doxxed for his opinions?”
”How much has he really influenced music, culture and criticism?”
”Being popular is cool, but how heavy is the head that wears the crown?”

This is the basis for this week’s newsletter.

The Cause and Effect of Being the World's Most Famous Music Reviewer

One does not become popular by luck, or via the ever fabled “algorithm”. Anyone can have a viral video, but very few can earn a very good living off critiquing and criticising music on the internet. So what caused Anthony Fantano to become the world’s most renowned music reviewer?

The Causes

1: The Tool

Name who you like, from Lester Bangs to Pitchfork, music criticism as an art form has been around since man first clacked two sticks together.

“No lightness of touch, the third clack of the stick was left wanting. 3 bones out of 8” - Neanderthal

Where an opinion and criticism differ, is whether there is an audience to hear it. Said audience is often provided by a publisher, who requires the critic to adhere to a language that their audience is attuned to. For example, Pitchfork requires a critic to deliver five hundred or more words and a rating (including decimals) out of ten. Your local Sunday paper requires 80 words and a thumb facing in one of two directions. YouTube on the other hand, requires optimisation:

1. Search: Especially in its first decade, YouTube’s primary functionality came from its Google powered search function. So if you’re early to the review and the quality is high enough, you’ll pop up second, if not first, when fans search for an album on the platform. Due to his longevity on the platform, Fantano is similar to being AAA A1 Plumbing in the Yellow Pages. His page rank is second to nobody except the artist themselves

2. Face to face: Unlike written reviews, viewers reward content that features a face, not just opinions. There are monolithic one-man-media-companies in every category of YouTube, from cooking to tech to lawn mowing, because someone was willing to put their face behind their words. A leap of faith that not many 1000-word-review-journalists were willing to do, for fear of losing credibility, or fear of trading in their advanced degree in Microsoft Word for a Final Cut Pro learners permit

3. Thumbnails: Famously, YouTube’s most popular creator Mr. Beast has a thumbnail designer on his payroll. Win the thumbnail, win the click and win the attention war. And nobody knows this better than Fantano. It almost doesn’t matter what his review says, the intent to watch is far more important than the video itself. To which, Fantano has three thumbnail techniques to earn your left click:

   1. The album cover: a recognisable icon that even a new audience can understand

   2. His face: which is now a recognisable brand and comes with a level of authority earned through years of grinding out review after review

   3. The flannels: the now famous red or yellow flannel, worn to represent a bad review (red) or a great review (yellow) - another code that returning viewers can understanding within 0.1 seconds of seeing his thumbnail on their homepage

4. Comment section: By the sheer fact that a comment section exists means that a music critic was eventually going to succeed on YouTube. Take most news sites these days - many (if not most) have evolved to a place where they have removed comment sections completely, as they have matured to a place where they realised that comments detract from the editorial, as it always devolves into a cesspool of pseudo intellectualism and trolling. By comparison, this is how a music review THRIVES. For the longest time, platforms could not tell the difference between sentiment and engagement, and as long as there were people arguing in some form, success that video would have! By merely having an opinion means that Fantano’s channel is automatically optimised for engagement

5. Music is the product: As tech reviewer Marques Brownlee put it, his sustained YouTube career is due to the fact that the products he reviews are the attraction, not himself. By merely reviewing the product, he is interesting and evergreen. Someone will want to know whether they should buy the iPhone 14, or listen to the new SZA album, and will go to YouTube to find their answer. Granted, the comparison isn’t as clean cut because music requires much more interpretation and taste in comparison to the question “is this phone fast?” - but Fantano can rest easy knowing that there will always be new music, and he merely needs to be there to review it
   

2: The Craftsman

When Twitch first launched, the question arose - “why would you watch someone play a game when you can play it yourself?”. One can only assume there was similar scepticism around a video music review in the late 2000’s. “Who would watch a music review when you can just listen to the album?”

This is where the early YouTube adopters saw the future and created content for a new audience, rather than an existing one. Audiences like me, who had YouTube as their home page, and felt connected to people showing you things that they knew you were looking for, before you knew to look for it.

Enter Anthony Fantano - at the time, a 24 year old political science and journalism major who dabbled in radio and podcasting. At the time, the only music reviewers I trusted were “established", “trusted”, "in print” and “old”. And here was this guy who was a similar age to myself, making reviews for a person like me - something I’d never experienced before.

Whenever I speak about Fantano to others, I say that his superpower is that he “speaks internet” - a language of its own and a language that few modern day critics possess, even to this day. If you compare a Pitchfork review to a Fantano video - the former is almost Shakespearean in comparison to the latter’s Benny Hill antics. Here are his ingredients to “speaking internet”:

• Laughing at himself: From his first video until now, Fantano has never presented himself as being overly serious. His videos are lined with in-jokes, characters and absurdity. This levity buys Fantano carbon credits when he eventually gets smoked for a bad take

• Being everywhere: Quick burns on Twitter, biting reactions on TikTok and music news on second YouTube channels, Fantano understands that speaking internet means being omnipresent. Traditional critics are bound to a by-line and masthead, whereas Fantano will just as happily post selfies and shit-posts in order to be front of mind

• Embracing the meme: Lastly, Fantano understands the power of the meme. If you provide the content, the internet will use it, and abuse it. If you can become a GIF, an emoji, a means to express one’s own satisfaction or dissatisfaction with an album, your presence is almost undeniable

I admit, I am breaking Fantano down into Tech-Crunch-level-chunks of internet culture meme-fodder. But underlying this is a rock solid foundation: he takes his job very seriously. Under the funny faces and flannels, Fantano’s reviews are well crafted, paced and articulate. His descriptions are vivid and his pop culture references are astute. He has earned the trust of his audience through both consistency and bravery to go against the grain. The craftsman may have mastered the use of his tools, but he must also have the vision to turn his handiwork into art.

3: The Marketing

Finally, I strongly believe that Fantano’s pervasive appeal has been through one very important factor: supercharging competition and gamifying music.

In 2003, Rolling Stone published their first edition of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. An arbitrary ranking made by a consortium of reviewers and artists, the book raised eyebrows and absorbed coffee stains the world over, becoming the quintessential music debate textbook and coffee table book of choice for ad agencies around the world. Imagine if the book had a comment section!

With the publishing of this book, the precedent was set. We can pit art against art. And we can do it in great quantities! We can be as hyperbolic as we like, and say these are the greatest 500 albums of all time, even though 90% of them are english speaking and 80% male! Fast forward to now, Fantano has countless videos of where the scale is almost the point. Top 200 albums of the 2010s, top 50 albums of 2022, 20 worst singles of the 2010s. Call it a byproduct of the Rolling Stone 500, or the viral infection of Buzzfeed listicles, audiences love to find out the best and worst because who doesn’t look forward to the reveal of the #1 spot. (Spoiler: it’s Beyoncé)

Smartly, Fantano has leant on this reliable format to further stake his claim as being THE music authority who has reliable virality. Listing 200 albums shows the breadth of his expertise, while ranking them means that you become enemy number one for music fans. Which in turn leads to Engagement with a capital E.

The Effect

Having (somewhat) set the table for how Anthony Fantano has managed to be the omnipresent music critic on the internet, we can now explore the impact that his monolithic shadow casts. 

1: Cultural impact

I think about this a lot.

By purely making a decision of which artist to review, Fantano sets the agenda of which artists should get attention and influences music thusly.

Being one man with one taste means that (I believe) Fantano has perpetuated (and perhaps vaunted) the popularity of such acts as Death Grips and Kendrick Lamar, while perpetuating the loathing of artists like Nav and Lil Xan - music that is much less intellectual, and much less deep (by design). It is only logical to assume that if you have millions of followers and you say that an album is a 10/10, that this is going to impact a very significant number of people, which in turn, influences music culture at large.

Don’t get me wrong, influence such as this is unavoidable. If I was placed in Anthony Fantano’s shoes, I’m sure you could say that I doggedly perpetuated the popularity of Yves Tumor and TWICE and the loathing of [redacted]. But his influence extends beyond the reviews themselves.

The most obvious and visible influence outside of his viewer’s taste is the artist themselves. Drake has attempted to clown him in his DMs, and he has also been subject to countless lyric mentions- from Post Malone to Brockhampton and Logic. 

A less obvious influence has been his language. Where Pitchfork has the decimal place, Fantano has “light” or “strong” ratings. A “light” 8 signifies a very good record. A “strong” 8 by comparison, is almost pushing the domino toward the coveted perfect ten. This language has now completely entered the wider public lexicon, to the point where people who have never seen a Needle Drop review will rate their pain au chocolat a “light seven” at their Sunday brunch.

2: King/Maker

What is unique about Publication Fantano is that he is the commissioner, editor, writer and talent. The positives of this is that he has the power and platform to highlight music that really excites him on a weekly basis, which in turn can change the course of an artist’s careers. With a favourable review, he can impact streams, album sales, festival bookings and motivate world tours. As a music fan who only wants the best for his favourite artists, what a privilege that would be. Similarly, with this reach and impact, one has the ability to diversify your audience’s taste, introducing them to albums that they may not have come across sitting at their 2017 Macbook Air eating hot Cheetos in Windsor Park, Austin.

The opposite is also true. Being one man with one taste (as broad as this taste may be) means that if you don’t connect with something, rate it poorly, or even not care for the genre, it can have quite the impact on the artist and mainstream music taste. This is probably why most restaurant reviews stop at 6/10 on the low end, because who wants to ruin the livelihood of a family run business with words alone? But unlike a restaurant review, music critics have the benefit of distance and disassociation from the artist. Giving an album a 1/10 feels much kinder than booing directly into an artist’s face.

Being that Fantano fills up all the roles in his org chart, his reviews are less a representation of the best/worst music out right now, but rather a representation of what he chooses to spotlight and compare against. I liken his “best of” lists to every butcher that I’ve ever been to, that has a sign that says “award winning sausages”. There is no doubt that they have won an award…at some point…somewhere…

A platform such as his has the ability to positively impact an audience when, say, he praises the urgent and important subject matter in To Pimp a Butterfly. But the opposite can also be true - by ridiculing or not reviewing a 5 Seconds of Summer album for example, Fantano diminishes the importance of coming of age pop music designed for a much younger audience. The impact of which likely won’t reach 5SOS’s fanbase, but more likely will impact his audience, who considers their music taste to be superior to a tween’s, and perpetuates the music snob trope eleven-fold.

3: Face the Music

The perks of being the world’s most famous music reviewer is that you are well known and well paid. But the drawbacks are not pretty. Just like you wouldn’t tell your colleague that their shoes are ugly in the off-chance you might get punched in the face, most wouldn’t have the stomach to shout from the rooftop that a person’s favourite favourite album is trash for fear of HAVING YOUR DIVORCE MADE PUBLIC AND TRENDING ON TWITTER.

I often think about the mental health impact that comes with being the sole face of your publication, and oftentimes I worry. Fantano is one of the more highly criticised people on the internet, purely by deciding to putting his face behind his reviews. “You make your bed” as they say, but I don’t think any human was designed to cope with sharing said bed with thousands of strangers, all hiding a handkerchief laced with chloroform behind their back.

4: Attack of the Clones/Clowns

Having earlier established that platforms play a huge role in influencing the types of creators that succeed on social media, TikTok has allowed the music critic landscape to boom. Want to amass a substantial amount of attention real quick? Tell TikTok that To Pimp a Butterfly “wasn’t even that good” in order to get attention and game views, in order to promote your douche kits and YouTube channel. This isn’t an example to make you laugh, this actually happened last week on TikTok.

Thanks to TikTok’s robust inbuilt editing tools and its hyper short form entertainment algorithm, it lowered the barrier for music critics to enter. No longer does someone need to critically analyse an album before scripting, lighting, shooting and editing a music review. One can merely hit record, play Frank Ocean’s White Ferrari in the background and throw a big ol’ thumbs down in the viewer’s face….and get a million views and be called all types of phobic.

The upside of this low barrier is that you have new, much needed faces in the music criticism space, a space that felt all too Fantanoful. I’ve seen much more diverse opinions and reviews from all walks of life, which has been a breath of fresh air. I too have benefited from these lower barriers, so I can only be so critical.

Conversely, I have seen hundreds and hundreds of very angry, very arrogant, very inexperienced, very attention hungry music reviewers - who usually come in the form of overly opinionated, highly male-skewing, highly Death Grips adoring reviewers, poo-pooing anyone’s taste that skews anywhere toward “mainstream” pop music.

Where Fantano has built up a huge amount of credibility through literally spending thousands of hours listening, scripting, filming and publishing reviews, now anyone with a Spotify free account can spread unvetted criticism for the sake of views within seven seconds flat.

5: Hyper-Gamification

The final effect that I’ve observed is not necessarily Fantano influenced, but is symptomatic of this sped-up review culture that has proven to be the second best engagement tactic outside of political flame wars.

If Twitter is the abscess where political bigots infect one another, TikTok is where these micro-strains-in-training test out their vitriol in the form of music reviews. It’s a place that has only sped up the politicisation of music to the point where there are countless video filters that give creators tools to:

• Pitt albums against each other in brackets like the NBA playoffs, where a nod of the head left or right approves or disapproves an album in order to decide which album is best in eight total nods

• Rank albums in tiers from S (ultimate) to A to C, without most of its rankers having heard most of the albums on the list

What these games do is accelerate art as competition, art as comparison, art as argument. I did make a whole podcast about this very topic (Music Criticism is Broken). For me, I much prefer to tell you who my favourite artist is, rather than spend an hour (or in the case of now, 20 seconds) proving to you that Cocteau Twins are far superior to Missy Elliot. (Not my opinion…but it got a rise out of you didn’t it?)

The counter argument to this is that “it’s all just a bit of fun Derrick - ya buzz kill” – which it is…kind of? If the audience is in on the absurdity of these rankings and that opinion doesn’t equal fact (or opinion doesn’t deserve verbal abuse). But, I fear that these algorithms thrive on being agents of chaos whereby conflict is far more sticky than informed and educated choices that conclude by saying “I like this but you don’t have to”. Liking an album is not just a personal experience but an outward pledge of allegiance and a commercial manifestation of one’s own identity. Come for my favourite album and come for me and my culture. I dare you.

The Last Emperor and an Unexpected End

It’s interesting you know, what started as a loose newsletter analysing the cause and effect of the internet’s most famous music critic, opened up larger questions around criticism, debate, and our nature to pick a side and survive by the side of the most dominant tribe.

Fantano, while not perfect, is in many ways less of the new frontier, and perhaps the last of the renowned critics who took the time to critically analyse an artist’s contribution to music. And while he is a byproduct of a platform, Fantano holds himself to enough of a standard to prove that his opinions should hold weight due to the fact that he takes what he does very seriously, despite the listicles. 

This reflection reminds me of the time when in 2017, DJ news site Resident Advisor intentionally took a hit to their readership when they ended their “top 100 DJs of the year” DJ poll. The publication expressed a desire to be platform of celebration and community, rather than a competition or popularity contest. It was a noble effort that lifted up the DJ community, but also knocked Resident Advisor down a few pegs in the war for attention and retention.

The new frontier is less a question of “how much power does Anthony Fantano wield” and more a question of “what is the value of criticism and critics moving forward?” If platforms (rather than publications) encourage unqualified, unedited criticism and unprecedented controversy (and douche kit sales), the whole purpose of a critic being the filter for quality dies. They are less of a critic, less of a commentator, less of a pundit - they are merely an empty reaction for the sake of starting an argument.

And as more music is being released than ever, there seem to be more public facing critics to tear said music down than ever. If a music critic drops a “top 1000 albums of 2023” list in a forest, does anybody listen to even one of the albums?

So dear reader, more than analysing the cause and effect of music’s most famous music critic, perhaps this newsletter is a eulogy to music criticism as we know it, and a celebration of the last music critic who had an impact before the number of albums and critics matched one for one.

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Thank you for reading. I’ve recently turned on paid subscriptions as many of you urged me to do so! I’ll be honest - I’ve had many pledges sent but I just let them expire because I didn’t feel like I was contributing enough. But I think that’s somewhat my nature - to start a fight on who pays the bill at a restaurant.

So in short, for those who wish to pledge, I graciously say - thank you.