Reviewing Anthony Fantano’s Review of Drake’s “Iceman”

Reviewing Anthony Fantano’s Review of Drake’s “Iceman”

The Internet’s most influential music YouTuber, Anthony Fantano of The Needle Drop, has yet again dropped a negative Drake review. As usual, a coterie of Fantano subscribers and Drake detractors assure us this is an unimpeachably objective assessment, and people who think it’s a low-quality review either can’t think critically about Drake or reflexively dismiss everything Fantano says. To many online, Fantano delivers reviews and takes with the authority of Moses coming down from the mountain. This article will take a less reverent view.

Stating my bias upfront, I do like Iceman (Drake’s first solo album since his rap battle with Kendrick Lamar), but think it is undeniably flawed. I don’t count Drake or Kendrick Lamar among my favorite rappers of all time and have not heard the entirety of either artist’s discography due to a lack of interest. But I can’t deny I was hyped for the release of Iceman, hoping that Drake would say something inflammatory enough to reignite the beef proper and return us to the halcyon days of 2024 when we were spoiled by so many excellent diss tracks from both parties.

While I have already heard from Kendrick and Fantano superfans, to the extent these are two different groups of people, that it is pathetic to write a lengthy essay because a YouTuber doesn’t like Drake, this is not my motivation. I enjoy reading music criticism more than I enjoy the music of Drake, and believe Anthony Fantano has done more to lower the standards of music criticism and poison online music discourse than perhaps anyone else. This point is rarely made because most people who are well read in music criticism don’t watch his videos, and vice versa. It just so happens that Fantano’s Drake reviews are among his most egregiously biased and poorly reasoned, making his Iceman review a perfect encapsulation of his incompetence.

The task of a music critic is to understand and evaluate the quintessence of a work: How fully realized is an album as the thing it is trying to be? Context matters insofar as it is required to understand the meaning and intention of a piece, and compare it to similar works. Panning a salsa album because you prefer metal is a failure, as is panning an album out of personal or ideological disdain for the artist. Neither approach understands or evaluates the art for what it is meant to be, and therefore cannot judge its success. So how does Fantano fare in his nearly half-hour review of Iceman?

The first six minutes have this to say: Molly Santana’s feature is bad, which is true. Otherwise, music is left to the side so Fantano can accuse Drake of associating with gambling addicts and rapists, whine about Drake’s album rollout, and speculate about his potentially waning influence.

Fantano frames this album as anticipated because people want to hear Drake address his recent beefs. But we will never know if this is a quintessential rap battle royale album because Fantano decided in advance that Drake making an album with such a concept is illegitimate.

Apparently, Drake shouldn’t criticize DJ Khaled because it’s too easy. I don’t know where this leaves Fantano, who has criticized and made fun of DJ Khaled himself to the tune of millions of views. If anything, Drake has more of a right to criticize Khaled since he knows him personally, helped keep his career afloat, and then felt abandoned by him in his most vulnerable moment. Fantano can mock Khaled in his capacity as a gossip vlogger, but people who know Khaled in real life cannot.

Fantano informs us that many of Drake’s disses aren’t witty. But all he really says about Drake’s Khaled diss (which was witty) is to tell us with begrudging approval that Drake said something pro-Palestine, to remind us that Fantano is On The Right Side of History.

Fantano continues about how the album is illegitimate because it took so long to drop, as if Jay Z’s excellent “Blueprint 2” Nas diss didn’t drop 11 months after Jay lost the battle to “Ether,” the “Not Like Us” of that beef. Is it so crazy that Drake also hopes to win the war despite losing the battle?

After more armchair psychoanalysis of Drake and his fans, Fantano finally reviews a song, quickly dismissing it because it disses LeBron James and “no one sane cares two years later.” Perhaps Drake cares about a personal friend (one he has a tattoo honoring) being seen in public enjoying a song calling him a pedophile? Wouldn’t you? Fantano’s main, recurring criticisms of Iceman are judgments about what Drake is and is not allowed to talk about that he could and did form before its release. Prejudices, if you will.

It can be easy to forget while watching Fantano’s review, but this is, in fact, an album by Drake discussing Drake’s life from Drake’s perspective, for better or for worse. Fantano seems to have expected an album by Drake about Fantano’s opinion of Drake told from Fantano’s perspective, addressing only people and topics Fantano thinks Drake should be allowed to talk about, and is not willing to accept anything else.

To quote Ryan Keller’s excellent “The Anthony Fantano Echo Chamber,” also available here on Medium: “Fantano, demonstrably ignorant of hip-hop traditions or its consumers… refuses to engage with art from a perspective other than his own… it’s why he resorts to stereotypes and borderline minstrelry to evaluate art made by black artists who don’t fit his respectability politics mold.”

Fantano’s political views may have done a 180 since the publication of that article (surely due to principle and conviction, not opportunism), but his approach to hip hop hasn’t.

I don’t understand why Fantano is so opposed to Drake talking about his relationships with specific people any more than I understood it when he had the same issue with Kanye West’s seminal My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which he compared to a tabloid. I suppose Fantano wants everyone to leave the gossiping to him. He certainly has enough experience to claim expertise in the field.

But his standard doesn’t apply consistently. Most hip hop heads never have nor will care about Jay Z and Beyonce’s marriage, but this didn’t stop Fantano from giving Lemonade and 4:44 8/10. Charli XCX’s song about her relationship with producer SOPHIE, which far fewer knew and therefore cared about than Drake and LeBron, merited a 10/10.

You can argue this was better music than what Drake made, but that’s not the point, is it? Either it’s legitimate for celebrities to dish on relationships with other celebrities that many listeners don’t care about or it’s not. Quoth Iceman: “Like the goal post, I’m out here just movin’ around.”

It’s hard to shake the feeling that Fantano simply dislikes Drake as a person and has developed a knee-jerk contrarianism about everything he says and does. If Drake likes tofu, seitan must be better. If Kendrick whines about Snoop Dogg not supporting him in the beef, he can still get a 9/10 (GNX). If Drake whines about Khaled and LeBron not supporting him, “no one cares.” Drake says tomato, so Fantano says toh-mah-toe.

Fantano doesn’t appreciate Drake’s short jokes about Kendrick either. See, these are much less dignified and intelligent than the usual insults we hear in classic diss songs like Kendrick saying Drake has fake abs or Nas calling Jay Z “Gay Z” or Jay Z calling Prodigy a ballerina or 50 Cent saying Big Pun is too fat to catch him on foot or Evidence saying Eminem can’t get it up…

Fantano bemoans Drake speculating that his Jewish roots might make people root against him. Has Kendrick not been using Black Hebrew Israelite and Nation of Islam rhetoric on his recent albums? Both ideologies are considered anti-Semitic by all serious people and extremist watchdog groups. It also strains credulity to believe Kendrick wasn’t aware he was evoking Israel-Palestine and therefore Drake’s Jewishness with his “colonizer” dig on “Not Like Us,” even if this is a secondary meaning of the line. I’m not arguing that Drake is right, but I do see where he’s coming from and don’t find it at all “insane” for a Jew to wonder if Kendrick has a problem with Jews. I haven’t a drop of Jewish blood in my veins, but have wondered if Kendrick might have a problem with Jews since the release of 2017’s DAMN.

People ignored Kanye West’s warm relationship with Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam for years before he ever became openly anti-Jewish. Neither of Fantano’s two reviews of West’s The Life of Pablo made note of the album’s Nation of Islam shoutout. Kendrick draws from a similar pool of conspiratorial crackpot theology. Drake could be wrong, but it’s not beyond the pale for him to raise the issue. You could defend Kendrick by observing that he is no smarter than Drake, and that the worldview he expresses in his songs stitches together random bits and pieces of contradictory belief systems that don’t make sense or form a unified logic when combined. But I don’t think Fantano would accept this explanation.

Drake is then criticized for streaming with Adin Ross, who we are told has done videos with the anti-Semite Nick Fuentes, which means Drake has no right to complain about anti-Semitism. Barack Obama has been interviewed on Real Time With Bill Maher. Maher is good friends with Kid Rock, who uses the N word both in his music and private life, in addition to having made numerous anti-black comments. Does this mean Barack Obama has forfeited his right to talk about how anti-black racism has affected him? This is the logic Fantano wants us to go along with. Not even guilt by association, but guilt by association of an association.

I can’t help but note in passing how many of the stupidest moments in Fantano’s Iceman review would never have happened if he did not feel the need to constantly inject his pedestrian political views and dime-store social commentary into album reviews. This essay might have been 300 words instead of 3,000+.

Fantano then says “no one has had the chance” to forget Drake’s recent beefs. So is Drake’s album bad because his beefs are still fresh in our minds and all over our timelines, or because it was so long ago no one cares? I can’t tell anymore. Drake is just bad, full stop.

To show Drake how things are supposed to be done, Fantano praises Jay Z for being “graceful” after he lost to Nas, which is just not true. He famously responded to “Ether” by bragging about leaving used condoms on Nas’ baby’s car seat after cuckolding him, was forced to apologize by his own mother, then dropped another Nas diss song about a year later criticizing Nas for the same kind of pseudointellectualism and hypocrisy Drake sees in Kendrick. Fantano speaks as if Jay Z just got over “Ether” and shifted his focus to fun radio songs. Even if Jay had done that, who cares? Why not evaluate this album on its own terms?

I don’t understand why Fantano objects to Drake’s way of handling a rap battle against multiple opponents in the first place. When Connecticut MC Christ Dillinger teamed up with former The Needle Drop Podcast guest Sam Hyde (who was already making openly racist and anti-Semitic comedy when Fantano interviewed him) for a viral Fantano diss track, Fantano’s response (according to Dillinger) was not to rap (which Fantano has done competently enough in the past) but to DM Dillinger accusing him of wanting attention and saying he could have helped his career but now won’t. Drake also dissed Kendrick, Rick Ross, DJ Khaled, etc. by accusing them of wanting attention and saying he could have helped their careers, but now won’t. Drake has already done what Fantano would do if he were in Drake’s shoes, albeit in songs instead of DMs. Is Fantano just mad because he thinks Drake is biting his style?

Fantano continues to execute his “review the man, not the music” strategy. Drake is a “creep,” and maybe a pedophile, and Michael Jackson is maybe a pedophile, too, and Drake is obsessed with sales numbers, which must be why he invites comparisons of himself to MJ. Is it unthinkable that Drake likes Michael Jackson’s music? Is Fantano making a point with real teeth by observing that a star from the decentralized internet era can’t match the commercial success of a star from an era of monoculture and physical media? Is any of this music criticism?

Fantano praises Drake for talking about how he’s stressed and unhappy on the opening track (despite whining and complaining about Drake whining and complaining on the rest of the album) before shifting back to how Drake only cares about numbers and doesn’t understand women and relationships as well as divorced ex-Gamergate activist Anthony Fantano, who thinks Drake sounds like an incel.

Such politically charged name-calling is important to Fantano’s reviews (not to mention his ego) because he has never evolved past the rhetorical style and subcultural narcissism of the edgy New Atheist skepticsphere “pwning creationists with facts and logic” slop that nursed him in his early days on YouTube. You are either in the in-group, which is for rational, enlightened übermenschen like Fantano, or in the out-group, which is for sheeple. Today, the out-group may be Christians, tomorrow social justice warriors and socialists, the day after incels and capitalists. It doesn’t matter. Fantano’s appetite for self-righteous dualism, moralizing, and grandstanding cannot be satiated. One day, he thunders condemnation on critics of Sargon of Akkad, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Sam Hyde; the next, critics of Hasan Piker, or whoever is currently sitting at the cool kids’ table of YouTube. One wonders if Fantano’s erstwhile comrades in the skeptic community remain atheists after witnessing his ability to be simultaneously a chameleon and a weasel, which violates the laws of physics and defies natural explanation.

Fantano doesn’t like Drake, so Drake is whatever the out-group is. “Incel.” “MAGA.” Fill in the blank. The specific slur doesn’t matter. “Incels” and their ideologues are (at least for now) in the out-group, thus Drake, one of North America’s most prolific fornicators, talks like he is involuntarily celibate. Fantano bravely dares to ask the question, “If Drake is so great, why did I call him out-group word and link him to out-group person?”

Fantano released another half-hour video, presumably of this ilk, titled “Is Drake MAGA” while I was in the process of editing this article. I didn’t watch it and can’t tell you what he said, though I could probably guess. Despite what the length of this article might suggest, I have better things to do with my time.

Fantano complains that Drake says he doesn’t know what’s going on back home (Canada) while vacationing in Australia and treats this as a claim he was oblivious to Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl performance. I am skeptical of this interpretation because Kendrick’s Super Bowl performance took place in the United States of America and, as my more discerning readers may already know, this is not part of Canada but in fact an entirely different country.

Fantano is also annoyed by Drake’s claim that he doesn’t know any Kendrick raps because Kendrick is successful and Drake hasn’t had a #1 hit recently. I would have instead pointed out how Drake repeatedly references Kendrick songs and lyrics on Iceman and is thus obviously lying instead of bringing up irrelevant matters. But what do I know?

Fantano complains about beat switches some more and attributes them to an inability to finish songs, as he has in past Drake reviews (this doesn’t apply to Freddie Gibbs’ much more respectable albums, of course). He then cherry-picks a corny Drake couplet to quickly dismiss the next song, pwning Drake with facts and logic.

Finally, we arrive at the lyric that derailed Fantano’s livestream reaction to the album, Drake’s funny and astute line about Kendrick being overrated by white listeners due to white guilt, which is the sort of thing a Gamergate hanger-on turned Breadtube hanger-on who almost lost his career due to allegations of alt-right pandering (an accusation he now seemingly wants to level at Drake) might experience. These feelings might even drive such a person to overrate Kendrick’s Very Serious and Respectable music to signal his own deep engagement with and support for black issues to other guilt-ridden cultural tourist whites. But I digress.

To his credit, Fantano doesn’t complain in his review that Drake has no right to criticize white audiences’ engagement with Kendrick because Drake fans don’t read bell hooks, as he said in his tantrum of a livestream reaction. What Drake suggests about progressive white audiences’ often perverse, self-absorbed relationship with black culture has, of course, been written about extensively by many black intellectuals (including bell hooks, who perhaps Fantano should read) and is a valid point even if Fantano thinks this critique should only be applied to white fans of black artists who aren’t named Kendrick Lamar.

Fantano reminds us of Drake’s controversial and oft-misquoted line on “Family Matters” painting Kendrick as a self-important fake activist. Fantano knows the latter line should never have been uttered because it mentions slavery, which Drake doesn’t have the right to do, despite being descended from slaves. Fantano is the authority on such matters.

Fantano then confusingly says Drake’s criticism of whites like himself begs the question of why whites listen to Drake. This is an easy question to answer.

White people listen to Drake because he makes accessible, melodic pop rap with lyrics designed to be relatable to the broadest possible swathe of the population without requiring any specialized knowledge or uncommon life experiences to understand. Remove the word “rap,” and you have a list of reasons white people listen to Taylor Swift.

This has nothing to do with a white listener’s relationship to an artist like Kendrick Lamar, who more frequently deals with themes of black trauma, identity, struggle, and liberation. It beggars belief that someone who has spent so much time comparing these two artists doesn’t understand this. Fantano sarcastically proposes whites must like Drake’s “male aggrievement,” pivoting back to the less shaky ground of gender politics to sidestep a conversation about race that could implicate our esteemed commentator. But at least we know Fantano doesn’t like toxic masculinity (anymore) and is On The Right Side of History.

“Ran To Atlanta” is criticized for being lackluster for a Future/Drake collab, which is mostly true, before the song is dismissed because it’s hypocritical for Drake to work with Future after his role in the beef. Every song on the album continues to prove illegitimate for reasons Fantano could have come up with without listening to the music by just reading the tracklist and looking at a calendar. Fantano doesn’t remind us of Drake’s uncharacteristically restrained line about Future in “Family Matters,” where he was portrayed as having been “roped into” the beef by Metro Boomin and Kendrick, a detail a critic might see as reason to wonder if Drake was already planning a Future reunion mid-battle. He doesn’t mention anything else that could be interesting about this collaboration, either. The time that could have been spent analyzing the strategy behind Drake’s decision to do a song with the man whose album hosted Kendrick’s first major Drake diss and an underground rapper from California was instead allocated to musings on incel culture and the airing of political grievances.

Our next song is subjected to Fantano’s signature “list a bunch of adjectives and genres” review style. This one is “buttery” and smacks of chipmunk soul. He concludes it could be good music to kill time with while driving to a gas station to buy boner pills. To quote Keller again: “Fantano replaces nuanced criticism with base observation/reaction.”

The critiques grow shorter and blur together until “2 Hard 4 The Radio,” which (surprise, surprise) is also conceptually illegitimate. This is because it is in a West Coast style and pays tribute to Mac Dre. Why does Fantano believe a tribute to Mac Dre, who influenced Drake and got a prominent shout-out on Take Care, is disrespectful? Well, because it’s a West Coast style and Fantano believes Drake is a “laughingstock” there. As a white man who lives in Connecticut, Fantano has his finger on the pulse of black popular opinion in Northern California, so much so that he can feel disrespected by songs on their behalf. You might expect Fantano to connect Drake reaching across the aisle by making a California-style song in the wake of a vicious beef with a prominent Californian to The Notorious BIG’s “Goin’ Back To Cali,” which did the same and is explicitly referenced by Drake later in the album, but you would be expecting too much. This song, at the time of writing, is #2 on the Apple Music chart in Mac Dre’s native Bay Area, having lost the top spot to another song from Iceman.

Fantano doesn’t like the “Don’t Worry” beat and finds it annoying, while plentiful nitpickable bars escape notice. The following song is again bad because Drake is mad at some former friends but still friends with Future, just like “Ran To Atlanta.” While I didn’t learn anything from Fantano’s critique, I must admit it is efficient to just give the same review to two completely different songs like this.

Fantano closes by complaining about Drake reflecting that he is no longer the same man who made the intimate, innocent music of his early career. Fantano snarkily calls this a supervillain origin story and interprets it as an attempt to sound menacing. It couldn’t possibly be read as a sincere or bittersweet sentiment. Then Fantano might have to actually review the song instead of just dismissing it out of hand.

At different points, Fantano tells us that Drake has some good or witty lines, but doesn’t devote any time to them. This leaves us with no way to know what they are, what they mean for the future of this beef, or if Fantano even understood them.

Iceman is declared Drake’s lowest moment and rated 2/10. I find it hard to believe he thinks this is a worse project than Room For Improvement, but maybe he hasn’t heard it.

A Needle Drop Drake review functions like the Razzies, the annual award show presumably recognizing the worst movies and actors of the year, but that, in practice, is just an excuse for the insufferably smug and marginally-smarter-than-average to commune over their superiority to popular culture and the tastes of the common man. When Movieweb calls the Razzies “petty and snobbish, targeting popular celebrities and films out of spite rather than providing meaningful criticism,” only the word “films” gives away that they are not writing about The Needle Drop.

So is this quality music criticism? No. As is to be expected from Anthony Fantano, it is mostly gossip, allegations about the artist’s character, and a diagnosis of whatever artist Fantano currently has a hate boner for as insufficiently progressive. He has been doing the same lazy shtick for years, and it has grown stale. Ironically, Fantano likes to say the same about Drake. Perhaps they have more in common than he realizes.