However people have become so determined for their favourite properties to be validated, that a 7 has begun to be seen as a negative score. On the basic 1 to 10 scale most critics use, a 5-6 should be an average, a 7-8 a good, a 9 a great and a 10 a masterpiece. And making this worse is our tendency nowadays to view review scores in a skewed manner. It’s like a wider scale version of incessantly showing your friends something you like in the hopes they will like it too and thus validate your opinion. Anyone who operates in or around internet fandoms will be familiar with the sight of fans flaunting high metacritic scores or sales as proof of their favourite piece of media’s quality. To put it bluntly, I think most people look to critics for validation and nothing else. One of the more intense tweets on the topic In the end, he gave it a “Strong 6 to a light 7”, which evens out to a 7 in his rating scale. As far as the album’s themes and ideas, his opinions were generally positive, and the review ends with him commenting that he would’ve preferred the ideas from the album in a more refined experimental music style than what we got.
In particular, he criticised a lot of the production choices on the album such as the drums which he roughly described as sounding less like drums and more like “anything that could be banged in front of a mic”, which is fair considering Apple’s unusual percussion choices. To give a brief overview, Fantano did a review of the album much the way he does any other album. The event that made me want to write this to begin with, was the recent controversy around Fantano’s review of Fiona Apple’s ‘Fetch the Boltcutters’. It’s less important who he is though, and more what his persona and controversies show us about the nature of media criticism, and the role of internet critics, especially in the internet age, where anyone with an internet connection and an opinion can become a critic. He’s reached notoriety due to not only the sheer amount of albums he covers, but also the entertaining and easily recognisable features of his brand. Fantano has become probably the most prominent music critic on YouTube, and one of the most prominent on the internet at large. So first off, who the hell is Anthony Fantano, and why should you care? “The internet’s busiest music nerd” as he calls himself, is very much that (except maybe the “busiest” part).
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