Yeah. I’d take a hot steaming dump on him.

Like I said, people hating Fantano is very often tied with him negatively reviewing something they like. 

You're not wrong.

I have an issue with him supporting white nationalists having the ability to speak like Milo Yiannopoulos, which pretty much matches his disregard for hip hop and most female-led music.

He plays fast and loose with his criticism, where his brand is more important than his thoughts. Hard pass.

Eh? He's mostly known as a hip-hop reviewer, that's the scene where he gets discussed most, and his most popular reviews are rap albums. He gave To Pimp a Butterfly and Kids See Ghosts 10/10, his highest score of this year I think is IGOR by Tyler the Creator and he's mentioned records like Atrocity Exhibition amongst the best of the decade. I have no idea how one could be familiar with him and come away with the take that he "disregards" hip-hop. If anything, it's the genre his channel is based around:



Again, it's amusing to me how much anger a man just saying his opinions about music generates online. 

I'd love you to give a reason why it's fair to say Fantano disregards hip-hop music or female artists. I mean, look at the video that got people talking about him on here just now, his weekly track round-up, and look at what he gave best song of the week. It's Hot Girl Summer. Y'know, a song that's literally by two female rappers. He's praised Billie Eilish as having one of the best albums of the year, is basically a Charlie XCX and Carly Rae Jepsen stan, and his best score for 2019 is a rap album. Not liking the guy is fine, but some of the reasons people come up with to justify it are very strange, particularly when 90% of them boil down to either "I find him annoying" or "he dislikes stuff I like". 

Excellent points. Does he have any unique takes or stances? He does love the already regarded biggies. Like is he the type of guy to say “Man, this new Strange Ranger album is straight fire. Best indie rock album I’ve heard in 5 years. Don’t @ me assholes!”. Probably not.* he’s no Lester Bangs.


* no idea if he actually reviewed that or likes it or hates it or whatever. Just an example.

Come on, I've seen him make NOTGOOD-segments on multiple hip-hop albums, as well as one by Miley Cyrus.

The dog whistles in this review are quite frankly, disgusting. The line: “at this point it’s kind of hard for me to even think of Future as a human being that is putting individual, cogent thought into a song” (2:30) coming from a white critic is more than a mere slip of the tongue. The Black imitation of Future at 5:55 is cringeworthy to say the least. And when he says, "No one is listening to a Future song for the lyrics." Which once again, for a white critic to completely disregard the experiences of a Black artist and his audience? I just don't see how anyone can't find a problem with that. As a critic, and especially a white critic, it's not Fantano's place to make that kind of claim. That's intellectually lazy, and possibly worse because he only makes the claim due to his refusal to meet Future's music on the artist's grounds. He refuses to do a critic's job, and that's interpret the artist's vision.

And that's what I mean by disregarding a certain type of hip hop artist, a subgenre, artists who are considered lesser by him because they make trap music or otherwise more abrasive versions of the genre.

Or another example, when he tried to whitesplain to Wale that his song "My Love" wasn't Afro-beat, the culture Wale was raised in, but Caribbean. And then tried to provide a video tutorial to prove it. Which given the context of this conversation is fairly ironic. Mind you, Wale is another trap artist.

Fantano clearly has a type of Black album he favors: it's the highly intellectualized works listened to by mostly educated white college students. The ones he swears have "deeper" meanings because they're above their genre conventions. But anything below that, he derides, refusing to find a deeper take. And as a Black listener, his dog whistles are usually very apparent to me.

In terms of women, his history is well know. On his podcast he invited Sargon of Akkad and Sam Hyde, both went on misogynist and sexist rants and he carried on, even agreeing with them.

Once again, I don't expect the guy to like what I like. But the guy has well-documented issues, and to just sweep them aside as the product of butt-hurt fans isn't the best course of action.

Ultimately, I'm just not understanding why you find the need to defend him so fiercely. But sure, "obviously [I'm] incorrect." You're an incredibly smart person Escapist, though your response was passive aggressive and patronizing. But I think you might need to take a step back on what you think proper representation for Black artists means, and if those conversations are happening in a meaningful way by a white critic. Because I'm not sure you're completely in a place to make that judgement, or to say what is "obviously incorrect."

His opinion is as important or as unimportant as anyone else.

He just so happens to have a big following, some of who, take what he says as fact. Weird.

He clearly puts in the description of every single video ''Y'all know this is just my opinion right?''
But fuck that,thats what art is. Subjective.
He pissed me off in the Foals What Went Down review,comparing A Knife In The Ocean with something Coldplay could put out. If you're gonna follow a music youtuber I recomend John from ARTV. Cool cat.

And yet you go on for a whole paragraph doing exactly that.

Fantano is the strangest of intellectual hills to die on.