Drake Goes After Music Critic Anthony Fantano In The DMs, Rating Him A "Light To Decent 1" On The Human Scale
This summer music critic Anthony Fantano gave Drake's "Honestly, Nevermind" album a rating of '"Not Good" out of 10', deviating from his usual 1 to 10 rating system with an extra burn. The YouTube video where he eloquently eviscerates it garnered over 1M views. Fantano's main takeaway:
"I really think this is Drake's lowest point yet in terms of level of effort. He put almost nothing into this record."
Fast forward to last night where Drake DMed Fantano & then shared what he sent the critic via his own Insta story (side note, reminder to me to charge my phone soon):
Basically Drake's poking fun at Fantano's 1 out of 10 album rating system by calling him a "light 1", and giving him slightly extra points on that 1 rating because Fantano is married to a black woman.
(It has to be said - In the pizza review world this is an amateur rating and he should have included a decimal in there somewhere, everyone knows the rules.)
But why would Drake leak his own seemingly unprovoked DMs at a critic he doesn't like anyways for a review from months ago? According to Variety:
In an unconventional move, Fantano may have prompted Drake to leak his own DMs by releasing a video on his second YouTube channel titled “Drake Slid Into My DMs,” in which the music reviewer presents elaborately fabricated DMs that show Drake messaging him a recipe for vegan cookies. It appears Fantano was baiting the rapper to expose himself.
On Instagram Live after Drake posted the screenshot, Fantano said: “Essentially what happened is that for reasons unknown to me, Drake was in his feelings, as he does tend to be.”
Fantano said he got a DM request from Drake, which he described as “a bit of a diss… a salty little DM. It was quite sad and unfortunate.”
Fantano continued: “This is why he has ghost writers. Because this is the quality of insult when you get when that man is working solo dolo. If I wanted a good insult in my inbox, he would have had to have paid somebody else to come in and do it.”
Sheesh!
In all honesty this is probably the best case scenario for Fantano (who has nearly 1M Twitter followers, 1.5M YouTube subscribers & nearly 700K Insta followers) as far as publicity & views, and it won't hurt Drake either way because you really can't punch down at a guy with hundreds of millions of dollars & hundreds of millions of dedicated followers on all fronts.
Fantano clearly realizes this & has hopped on Drake's DMs for all their worth in his follow-up responses. Last night he was sure to re-post the review that started it all, and his YouTube video about the whole thing is in the top 20 videos across the entire site.
Most importantly, I'm going to see if Kontent Kim will bake those vegan cookies for the office next week & if Big Cat rates them anything about a light 1.1 we will all be shocked.