Drake shares his own DMs in incredibly stupid feud with music critic Anthony Fantano
Fantano read a fake version of Drake's messages before the musician decided to publicly post them anyway
Music Features Anthony Fantano
Drake, the rapper, actor, and living embodiment of a raw nerve, has, it turns out, been running through his critics’ DMs with his woes. Prompted by Anthony Fantano (who runs YouTube channel The Needle Drop) giving his recent releases less-than-glowing reviews, the musician decided to act like a Certified Hater Boy, send a late-night private message to Fantano, and then make that message public so the whole world could see that he’s the kind of celebrity who sends his critics DMs when he’s mad at them.
This all started when Fantano posted a video yesterday to say that Drake sent him a message on Instagram just after midnight earlier on the same day. He reads out what he received through an edited shot of the post, pretending that the musician got in touch to say he politely disagreed with Fantano’s criticism of his work, thank him for enjoying past releases, and pass along a vegan cookie recipe.
Apparently appalled that Fantano responded to the real DM with a friendly joke, Drake then took to his Instagram stories to post a screenshot of what he actually sent.
The burn he was so proud of—the one he refused to let anyone believe was a reasoned response to a music critic reviewing his work—reads: “Your existence is a light 1. And the 1 is cause you are alive. And cause you somehow wifed a Black girl. I’m feeling a light to decent 1 on your existence.”
Having seen Drake make a goofy insult that plays off of the musician’s knowledge of both Fantano’s personal life and review format public, the critic hopped on an Instagram Live this morning for a video (captured here) where he basically can’t stop laughing at the ridiculousness of the entire situation.
In it, Fantano says he was confused why Drake would even DM him since he’s not a teenage girl, says the poor quality of the message is “why he has ghostwriters,” and basically makes fun of the idea that a critic sharing his opinion bothers an extremely wealthy and successful pop star enough that he has to not just DM him in the first place, but then show what he wrote after being lightly goofed on for it. Fantano ends the whole thing by restating that he likes some of Drake’s past work and that, ultimately, he just finds the whole situation really funny.
Maybe this kind of reaction will cause Drake to reflect on the uselessness of his many beefs. Or, hey, maybe it will inspire him to reveal that the Fantano DMs are all the work of a strange shadow self. Maybe he’ll finally speak about the evil doppelganger who emerges from beneath his bed at night to record his worst verses and pick dumb fights: The notorious Fake Drake.
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66 Comments
I never understood how Drake ever became a thing, and I really can’t understand how he is still a thing.
That’s awfully ableist of you.
As the great Bomani Jones once said, “I’m not the type of guy who hates on millennials, but how you gonna make this busta your number one MC?”
If Drake had come out 10-15 years earlier, he wouldn’t have made it through a single cypher, much less become the biggest rapper in the world. At some point, the hip hop audience lost their distaste for toys.
Young Money. That’s it. That’s the answer. Drake only knows about cyphers in the context of encryption.
You contain nearly nothing.
Your comments lack meaning.
So disappointed in Pusha T for not burying this lame when he had the chance. I thought it was supposed to be a “surgical summer”? What the hell, Push? You lose your medical license?
Yeah, I was hoping he would truly body him. But the reality is, even that kind of thing doesn’t matter anymore. Hip hop just isn’t being received by an audience that is predominantly or even more than a tiny bit part of the culture, so skills, credibility, talent, realness, none of that matters anymore. And things just keep getting chopped up. Used to be you had to have a dope record. Then it became just about singles and features. Now, success is really all about whether you can come up with a pop song with a 15-second piece that white girls want to lip sync in a Tik Tok video.
i don’t know much about hip-hop; has it experienced its ‘smells like teen spirit’ moment?
Is the whole “your existence is a light 1″ an insult that has more cache in the hip-hop world or something? I don’t feel one way or the other about Drake, but that “burn” reads like it was written by someone who has been surrounded by syncophants that laugh at his every joke for years.
I wondered that too but, based on the video, it sounds like it’s a riff on fantano’s own rating system.
It’s a not-at-all-clever attempt to mock Fantano’s review style where he says things like “this album is a strong 8/10″ or whatever.
It’s a reference to Anthony Fantano’s rating system. They’re both dorks.
It’s a reference to the scoring system Fantano uses in his reviews.
Me thinks it’s a play on that particular critics review system.
Typical Drake erasure. Do better.
So… you don’t understand that other people can have different taste in music than you? I dont even like Drake, but this comment is stupid. “I dont like this person, therefore it’s dumb that they are popular!”
LAST NAME EVER, FIRST NAME GREATEST
Boooooo. Lame typical “above-it-all” yet strangely invested enough to take the time yo comment. GTFOH.
Bizarre take, son.
I explain Drake the same thing I explain Kanye: The quality of hip-hop has been so dire since the late 90s that the bar they needed to get over was floor height.
Sure. Lootpack: just awful. That MF DOOM guy’s collabs with Madlib: total garbage. Dire, all of it — the entire artform died.
Or maybe the good stuff stopped being popular? That happens. The industry’s not built around oldheads.
Drake had Lil Wayne’s backing, the same way Eminem and 50 Cent had Dré’s. That’s all that was.
The bar you’re referring to never fucking mattered to anyone but backpack nerds (or which I am part). The bar’s always been rock-bottom low in the industry.
Lootpack’s last album came out in 1998. And I don’t think anyone was suggesting that older artists never made any more good records, just that nearly every new artist since has bee terrible.And a wack rapper having a cosign and a good rapper having a cosign are not the same thing. I thought we were discussing the quality of music.No one said the industry could or should have stayed the same. But that doesn’t affect the objective reality that the qualities of flow, lyricism, originality, intelligence, and humor in hip hop basically flatlined in this millenium, and are only getting worse.And Drake is the apotheosis of huge success with minimal ability, not to mention a corny fucking persona that would have killed his garbage career instantly 25 years ago.
We mostly agree on everything. I just fucking hate that we sound like boomers insisting Jimi Hendrix is the be-all and end-all of the electric guitar.
Rakim moved the art forward. MF DOOM got all Johann Sebastian Bach with the symmetry and all that. (I’m skipping a bunch of shit, but yeah, flow, lyricism and intelligence matter — like teachers taught poetry at my high school using those bars.)
But can we please acknowledge that even the Golden Age was littered with trash? Like, for real. The Beatles put out some good records, but if you look at what was being released at the time, most of it was garbage. Boomers just remember the hits.
And so it is with us.We remember the good MCs — and a bunch of them got shot, which fucking sucked — let’s not tiptoe around that.
We remember the good producers — most of whom are still around! — awesome.
But yo, even when hip-hop was at its best, the vast majority of it was… not up to the standard by which contemporary hip-hop is judged, and that bothers me.
Let the kids have their fun. A tiny fraction’s going to be dope, and the rest fucking terrible. Same as it always was.P.S. Fuck Drake.
No Limit endorses this message.
“Or maybe the good stuff stopped being popular?”Thanks for back(pack)ing me up on this one.
Don’t compare the two. For all of his faults as a human, Kanye West is an excellent producer, a generous collaborator, and the College Dropout > Late Registration > Graduation > 808s + Heartbreak > My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy > Watch The Throne > Yeezus run is probably the most creative, forward-thinking, adventurous and entertaining runs in the history of hip-hop.
Except Ye produces his own beats, you may not like him or his lyrics personally but he is undeniably a hugely influential and critically acclaimed musician.
i’ve mentioned this before… drake is the only artist that made me feel dumber for having listened.and that’s not even getting into his whole culture vulture vibe.
Ah, the classic “I don’t understand how people like this thing that I don’t like” post.
why Drake would even DM him since he’s not a teenage girl, says the poor quality of the message is “why he has ghostwriters,” Goddamn, that is a brutal retort. I love it.
It’s the best comeback possible, because it’s true and everybody knows it (Except the media when he inevitably gets busted, who will be shocked that he did that thing he made the bare minimum attempt to hide for the last decade-plus.)
The worst part of Drake’s music is when you have to hear Drake, and his weird ass monotone talky chants, or whatever you would call what he does.Everything about One Dance is amazing except his fucking awful voice.
Like a deviated septum got a record contract.
Rex Harrison-esque talk-singing?
By George, I think you’ve got it!
You’d think Drake would be mindful of bullying after what happened to him in high school. I mean, yeah, it was totally Spinner’s fault, but shit.
Drake is still the dork who practiced rapping in his trailer between filming scenes on Degrassi. Then he got signed to Young Money and people in the US decided that was good enough for them.
So after literally decades of Canadian MCs getting bounced hard from the US market due to lack of street cred, some fucking suburban dork became one of the best-selling rap artists ever.
Way to go, guys.
THERE’S ONLY ONE CANADIAN MC I RECOGNISE. THE OG:
[Tom Green has entered the chat]
Fun bit of hip-hop trivia, same sample:
Also ‘beaucoup’ means ‘a lot’ in French.
I mean, he grew up in Toronto, near a subway station and everything, as far as I understand. Did he live in the core? No. But he’s from the Toronto equivalent of Brooklyn or Queens, depending on who you ask.Still a dork.
Long Island would be a closer analog.
Hey now, he lived in a basement apartment probably 20 minutes by subway from the Toronto equivalent of Times Square.
OK you got me. That’s really funny. Well done.In case anyone thinks Drake actually grew up in the hood: basement suites in detached homes located in safe, affluent neighbourhoods are a thing, and mass transit runs through those places.As in: subway access in TO — or Vancouver or Montréal or even Ottawa for that matter — is no way to determine how rough an area is, much less transit time to Nathan Phillips Square.‘Crossing the tracks’ is also a thing in Canada, and Drake grew up on the nice side.
Oh, 100%, no arguments there. But as someone who grew up in Toronto, a lot of the suburbs — inner or outer — are actually “rougher” (I use quotation marks because that’s usually a euphemism for non-white or non-model minority) than the so-called inner city. A suburban kid could’ve beaten his ass is what I’m saying, signed a lower-middle class kid who grew up a few blocks from the last stop on the subway on one side, a few blocks from the border of the 905 (vs. the 416) on the other.My only point was that geographically, I don’t think he lived in the suburbs and that even prior to rampant gentrification, Toronto had a lot of “nice” areas near the subway.
I felt like there was a degrassi joke to be made here, and while you didn’t exactly make a joke, this reference is good enough for me to not make the effort.
Degrassi is the joke.
If we’re comparing recent celeb DMs to critics, Amandla Stenberg wins. She at least didn’t post the DM herself, her message was somewhat funnier (low bar to clear here), and it only came off maybe 10-20% bitter. Whereas Drake comes off 80-100% bitter and like an actual crybaby.
Remember a few years ago when people were having serious debates about Kendrick vs Drake?The answer seemed obvious then and even more so now.
Is Kendrick a better rapper? Obviously. But he associates with serial rapists like Kodak Black, who was heavily featured on Kendrick’s latest album. That knocks him down a few pegs IMO.
Drake has never been anything other than a cornball…but am I the only one who can’t stand Fantano either? Dude is basically Joe Rogan for suburban, upper middle class hip-hop fans who blather on about “the culture” on hip-hop subreddits as if it’s something they are an authority on. You know, the same kind of people who fueled Drake’s career in the first place and continue to unironically call Kanye West a genius.
Fantano has a deep love for hip hop and knows the game. Comparing him to Rogan is bleuch.
It blows my mind how Larry Graham’s nephew could be such a fucking dork.
Uh? Anthony Fantano’s married? Dude’s like Asuka in that regard.
Everyone involved in this should be put to the sword
Dear Drake… in the words of DJ Khaled… Congratulations, you played yourself.
Funny, I can’t get through a Drake album so most of the time when I hear about him it’s because he is getting totally fucking owned by somebody (or being annoying at a Raptors game)Not a great look to pick a fight with Fantano and get completely massacred, it’s like he tried to punch down after Pusha T ended him and just wound up showing he’s got a lot further left to fall…Drake could get owned by Eric Trump.
Funny, I can’t get through a Drake album so most of the time when I hear about him it’s because he is getting totally fucking owned by somebody (or being annoying at a Raptors game)Not a great look to pick a fight with Fantano and get completely massacred, it’s like he tried to punch down after Pusha T ended him and just wound up showing he’s got a lot further left to fall…Drake could get owned by Eric Trump.
Dang. Imagine getting owned by this Fantano doofus.
I never understand why so many fabulously rich people are so thin-skinned and defensive. It always seemed to me that one of the advantages to staggering generational wealth is that you don’t have to care what anyone thinks.If you’re Drake, why the hell do you care what some random YouTube critic says? Shouldn’t you be too busy Scrooge McDuck-ing it in a giant pool of gold coins?
While I am not a Canadian, I have been in Canada numerous times and much of that is in Toronto.I feel very sad for Canadians who have to bear the ignominy that many people in the rest of the word think that Drake is talented.He is NOT. He has NEVER BEEN. He will NEVER BE
Drake is such an incredibly lame corny ass tool bag.