The Needle Drop’s Anthony Fantano Responds To His Week Of Controversy
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High-profile music critic Anthony Fantano has responded to the controversy around his online presence, a week after The Fader published an extensive article detailing the questionable politics of one of his YouTube channels.
While Fantano is best known for his music review channel The Needle Drop, until last week he also ran a channel called thatistheplan, which was dedicated to meme reviews and 4Chan-inspired shitposting — with a bent The Fader interpreted as alt-right.
Now in a 20-minute video uploaded to main YouTube channel, Fantano has labelled The Fader article as a “hitjob” and strongly defended himself against each of the article’s claims, asserting that thatistheplan actually had a “pretty obvious liberal slant”, and The Fader writer has an “inability to understand humour.”
“My stance on these issues is painfully clear,” Fantano states, in regards to The Fader’s specific accusations of racism in his gag videos about rappers Hopsin and J. Cole. “Which if [the author] had done any research, he would have caught.”
“There’s nothing inherently right-wing about clowning rap fans, or memes, or edgy humour,” Fantano maintains.
He also addresses the incident in which his Needle Drop podcast guest, Sam Hyde, made comments detailing how he would like to violently attack actress and writer Lena Dunham. Hyde’s comments included that he would “destroy Lena Dunham so badly that the people that come to clean her up, they’re gonna be puking when they see what I did to her.”
But Fantano maintains that this is “a comedy bit” for Hyde, and that “my reaction to what Sam is saying and doing is not at all how the writer characterises it.”
“I was sitting there telling Sam that ‘a lot of people are going to be listening to this, are you sure you wanna say this?'” Fantano says. And while he admits that he did laugh during Hyde’s rant, Fantano says it was “clearly nervous [laughter].”
“The writer could have done some legitimate research here,” Fantano says in summary at the end of the video. “But instead he’s trying to paint me as being in bed with a racist political movement based off memetic humour.”
Make what you will of Fantano’s full response below.