Thank you for reading Evil Speakers. Look for my weekly column on Thursday. Also, you can preorder my upcoming book (due Sept. 8) “Is This It: The Never-Ending Rise and Fall of The Strokes (and Rock ‘n’ Roll)” from BN.com this week and get 25 percent off. Just enter the code “PREORDER25” at this link by Friday June 26. Publishers Weekly just posted the first book review, calling it “an insightful, entertaining meditation on rock ’n’ roll might-have-beens.” I’ll take it!
To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.
Earlier this week, the popular YouTube music critic Anthony Fantano gave an interview to Variety in which he said the following:
“I don’t have to prove my track record to Halsey,” he maintains. “I have been the most relevant and impactful music critic of my — and any — generation for over 10 years now. You can’t really debate that. There’s no music critic bigger than me who’s had more impact than me for as long as I have, consistently. And if I die tomorrow, nobody’s going to outdo that run.”
Some context is necessary here: Fantano was responding to an exceedingly stupid controversy on social media involving his review of Halsey’s 2024 album The Great Impersonator. Though the actual issue concerns a large corps of very online and very aggressive Swifties — the source of most things bad and evil on the internet — who are mad that Fantano recently posted an interview with Olivia Rodrigo, a long-time target of ire from that dreaded stan army due to some arcane argument (allegedly?) involving Taylor Swift and songwriting credits on Rodrigo’s first album. And in the process they dredged up some out-of-context quotes from Fantano’s Halsey video for the purpose of … good God in heaven, I feel the life exiting my body as I recount this sorry state of affairs.
Enough context! I’m more interested in that quote above, the one where Fantano calls himself “the most relevant and impactful music critic of my — and any — generation.” When I read that, my immediate reaction was to chuckle at Fantano’s hubris. But then my immediate reaction after that reaction was to wonder, “Could he possibly be correct?”
If you don’t know: Fantano posts videos several times per week on his YouTube account, The Needle Drop, which has over three million followers. Many of those videos are album reviews, which depending on the artist might have tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of views. On the world’s biggest video platform, he is the most visible music critic, and has been for years now.
Now, I happen to despise the word “relevant” in this context, mostly because I don’t know what it means. Does it suggest a certain level of influence in the music industry that goes beyond quantifiable numbers? Does it mean Fantano tangibly impacts the streams of a song or album he reviews? Or does it simply signify that a lot of people watch his videos? If it’s the last one, I’m sure Fantano is right, at least in the modern world. (Ever is a different story, and despite what Anthony says, it’s certainly “debatable,” as we’ll discuss in a moment.) But back to “relevant” for a second: Does Anthony Fantano really matter outside of his (relatively large for a music critic) audience? In the way that a famous critic might have mattered in the days of a more centralized, top-down media? What’s his Q rating among those who spend, say, under a zillion hours per week online? And, in terms of those videos, what exactly does a “view” connote, anyway? I have “viewed” many YouTube videos in my life, and I don’t know that I’d call the vast majority of them “relevant” or even “memorable.” A “view” seems like a rather cheap commodity, when you think about it. (Though that’s surely the writer in me talking!) Then again, in the “pisses people off regularly department,” Fantano is the reigning king of music criticism, a significant feat no question.
I don’t really know Fantano at all, but we have spoken a handful of times — most of our interactions (all friendly!) were on Twitter, either via DM or public replies, but the big one was over the phone for an interview I wrote up in May 2025. This is what I said about him at the time:
I don’t always, or often, agree with Fantano’s approach or his opinions. (Giving MJ Lenderman’s instant-classic Manning Fireworks a “light 3” is a capital crime against music criticism in my own personal court of law.) But I respect what he does and the audience he’s built. Given the thousands — if not tens of thousands — of videos he’s created since starting his YouTube channel in 2009, virtually none of his haters can claim to have as strong of a work ethic. Also, it must be acknowledged that talking about music on camera in a manner that feels natural and engaging (as opposed to stiff and pedantic) is very difficult — way harder than Fantano makes it look in his otherwise breezy clips.
Above all, I genuinely admire how this guy says what he thinks despite knowing that no matter the opinion, a good part of the Internet is going to be pissed off. Every critic with a platform has to deal with hostility from readers and artists on occasion. It’s part of the job, and it’s the price you pay for having a big mouth in public. But no working music critic right now takes more guff than Fantano, in ways that aren’t always fair.
I stand by all that – especially that last part, and especially this week after the Halsey thing. However, a lot of my peers who express their opinions by typing rather than talking seem to really resent Fantano. Some of that, of course, comes down to jealousy — over his reach, over the size of his audience, and over the money he (presumably) makes. But there are some legit points of disagreement in terms of his critical style. Fantano essentially is a “hot or not?” music critic — the basis of his videos is all about whether he likes something or dislikes something, and he doesn’t really deviate from that. For critics like me who type out their opinions, it can seem a little (or a lot) superficial. We like to delve into the larger questions in our reviews — where does this record come from in terms of music history, why does it matter in the larger culture, and what is it pointing toward [pretentious music critic voice] in terms of us?
Now, admittedly, many people don’t care about those questions. They just want the “hot or not?” part, which is why Fantano’s videos do so well. (There’s also the mysterious algorithm, which has done very well by him. But I’ll table that conversation for now.)
When I interviewed Anthony, he said something in the moment I thought was funny, both in form and in content: “I mean, not to suck my own dick, but I revolutionized the music review.” After it was published, a couple of self-serious music-criticism defenders with grimly unsmiling avatars — the very lifeblood of that thriving internet community known as Bluesky — took me to task for not immediately pouncing on Fantano and taking him to task for what he said.
For the record: I didn’t interrupt Fantano because (1) I generally like to let interview subjects speak at length, particularly when they’re saying something self-evidently outrageous, and let readers form their own impressions; (2) I actually, basically, agreed with him. The YouTube album review has undoubtedly revolutionized music criticism in the past 10 to 15 years, whether you like it or not. And Fantano, as the most famous practitioner of that form, deserves a lot of the credit for that revolutionizing. Sorry! He just does.
But does that make Anthony Fantano the most “relevant” (or “impactful” or important or whatever synonym you want to use) music critic ever? I have a hard time accepting that. I might give him the 21st century, but music criticism as we know it — and I think it’s clear we’re talking popular music criticism here, not classical or jazz or anything predating the premiere of Rolling Stone magazine in 1967 — existed well before Anthony Fantano.
I’m well aware this is the opinion of a middle-aged man. And I’m curious to hear the takes of those with different perspectives. But before that I want to share my list of the top five “most relevant” music critics ever.
(To be clear: These aren’t my favorite critics. Just the ones that seem to mean the most in terms of the common understanding of the field where I make a living, based on the number of mentions I’ve heard from “civilians” over the years.)
