“This is completely unreviewable trash – and here’s why.”
It was an unusual opening to the latest video by Youtuber Anthony Fantano, the music critic behind the successful online channel The Needle Drop.
But the album Fantano was referring to was in no way ‘usual’.
Instead, he was talking about the latest release by disgraced rapper, Kanye West, who has caused uproar with a series of antisemitic outbursts in recent years.
West’s album, Vultures 1, a collaboration with singer Ty Dolla $ign, was released to a wave of fresh criticism, including from rock singer Ozzy Osbourne who claims West sampled a live version of Black Sabbath’s song ‘War Pigs’ without permission.
Fantano pointed to West’s chequered last few years, in which he has regularly endorsed and spread antisemitic theories, including endorsing Adolf Hitler in a 2022 interview with fellow conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
“At some point I think he realised how much he f****d up with all of that, so now he has to own this total dumpster fire he’s created.
“Even if [West] does genuinely apologise and change his behaviour past this point his public image is forever altered by all of this.”
He said that on a practical level, too, the album was unreviewable because West’s remaining fans had theorised that Fantano’s previous criticism of the rapper was because he is a Jew himself, which is not the case.
Therefore, they “will write off any bit of dissent as just being biased and unfair to him, as if he is Jesus Christ… There’s no convincing them”.
In decades gone by, Fantano has given West’s music perfect 10 scores, including as recently as the 2018 release Kids See Ghosts with Kid Cudi.
But, referring to Vultures 1, Fantano said: “Even if this record was somehow ‘good’, what am I supposed to do? Tell the Jews in my audience: ‘Come on man, he didn’t mean it, it’s not so bad, he’s just a little crazy that’s all’?”
The reviewer added that West is “very apparently not sorry for anything he has been doing,” and that “you can’t separate [West’s rants] from the music because it is in the music”.
He pointed to a lyric from the album which claims West is “Crazy, bipolar, antisemite / And I’m still the King”.
The lyrics are “saying things which are not good or normal,” Fantano said.
After a short passage of talking about the songs on the new record, the reviewer concluded that it has “achieved the status of being Kanye’s worst album”.
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