VICE’s Culture Club heads straight into the discourse pit this week, as host Jackson Garrett sits down with Anthony Fantano—YouTube’s longtime The Needle Drop reviewer and self-proclaimed “busiest music nerd on the internet.” They’re here to figure out what music criticism even is in 2025, and Fantano gets straight to the point, shrugging off the idea that he’s a pure tastemaker. “I feel like I’ve become the guy to turn to, to get angry at,” he says. “People want to know what music take not to have or something.”
In the episode, Fantano talks through how the music critic’s role has shifted as algorithms took over discovery. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, long YouTube reviews could genuinely launch “weird bands and weird rappers.” Now, most listeners get fed new songs by systems that clock what you already like and serve up, what he says is “another thing that you would also maybe like,” but “algorithms can only work so well in terms of…breaking you out of a certain sound or a certain perspective.”
That fractured landscape is part of why this summer felt so musically off, with no single song breaking through across platforms or age groups. Some people still insist there was no “song of the summer.” Fantano reluctantly disagrees and officially crowns Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” as the closest thing to it: “It’s a normy stomp clap jam.” Still, boomers on Facebook, millennials on Instagram, Gen Z on TikTok, and everyone else yelling on Twitter/X all had different anthems that never fully overlapped.
That lack of shared taste continues in the rap genre. Rap’s supposed “fall off” gets the same treatment. Charts showed hip hop briefly disappearing from the Billboard Top 40, but Fantano refuses to call it dead. Legacy stars like Drake and Kanye West (or Ye) are in strange late-career spots. Fantano is blunt about Kanye West, an artist he once praised heavily but won’t review again without “a genuine kind of redemption arc.” For him, that requires a real apology and repairing relationships so collaborators aren’t gambling their reputations. Fantano says legacy acts have “either gone psychotic or they’re worrying more about…their singular fan base.” Meanwhile, younger artists lean into “really distorted, blown-out sounds” you’ll “never hear at a family barbecue.”
The most cursed question of the episode turns out to be about ska. Fantano shouts out the people keeping the horn-core flame alive, but he’s brutally honest about its odds. “I don’t think we’re in a ska-friendly era right now,” he says, blaming a culture that’s way too “cringe conscious” to sincerely skank in public. “People need to loosen the f*** up and become, like, less self-conscious,” he adds, basically arguing that ska’s revival would need a complete vibe shift, not just a viral single.
The episode still keeps things fun. Jackson has Fantano rate years of his Spotify Wrapped and play a real-or-fake Wikipedia genre game, where he fumbles “unblack metal” and recoils at “cringe pop.” Beneath the bit is a clear thesis: monoculture is gone, the algorithm is king, and the few critics left with real influence are trying to stay honest in a world that feels increasingly for sale.
Watch the full VICE Culture Club episode to see everything Fantano couldn’t fit into a single rant.
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