Music critic Anthony Fantano has beef with rapper Wale over a song review

54  2017-05-04 by [deleted]

Anthony Fantano (the internet's busiest music nerd, /u/theneedledrop) has beef with rapper Wale (/u/LexiconLegend) after criticising one of Wale's new songs. It started when Fantano accused Wale's new song, My Love, of being "one of the ugliest attempts at capitalizing on the Caribbean craze". Wale responded by claiming that it's an afro beat song, a genre that he grew up with, and is not an attempt to jump on the dancehall wave. Fantano replied with a two minute video educating Wale on his own culture's music. Wale then tweeted a picture of Fantano captioned with "The creator of Afro beat". Fantano went on to sarcastically tweet that "Diplo and Major Lazer are classic Afropop artists."

The Kid Mero (writer and tv presenter) popped in to call Fantano a weeb, which lead Heems (rapper of Das Racist fame) to call Fantano "a big waste of bandwidth and human trash". He then went on to say "I'll call a dude trash if his views are trash. This dudes the Donald trump of rap reviews. Habadat." Fantano proceeded to completely destroy Heems with "Then why was your PR person sending me irritated e-mails last year cuz of your "disappointment" over no Swet Shop Boys review?"

Vince Staples (another rapper) chimed in and attempted to organise a fight between Wale and Fantano. Wale replied with "imagine him tellin u about a genre you literally grew up in", and got BTFO with "lmao if you spent all that time around the genre, how come you can't make a decent track of it?" Fantano refused to fight Wale on the grounds that his latest album was a flop and it's not worth his time.

There is a /r/hiphopheads thread about the beef, but not much drama.

TLDR: Pasty white guy attempts to educate a rapper about what genre of music he makes

43 comments

Wow, that's a lot of links! The snapshots can be found here.

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Then why was your PR person sending me irritated e-mails last year cuz of your "disappointment" over no Swet Shop Boys review?

Holy shit Fucking annihilated

Based fantano

This but in all honesty

Best teeth in the game

Melonman is based

Blownthetony fuckoutano

I’m having a difficult time seeing nothing but sadness when a generic guy talks down someone who makes generic music.

I mean, that fruit is low you might need to dig a hole before you pick it up.

This is better suited for /r/cringe especially with all that macho violence and autistic English.

That's African American Vernacular you racist crackah

Vernacular

Irony of that word being used to indicate that

Honestly tbh you need to reeducate yourself white boi

Nah, I'm good

I've always thought this too tbh. Stupid to call it AAVE when literally no one who actually speaks it is going to call it that

It's called Ebonics. Calling it AAV is whitesplaining

Melonhead is probably in the wrong here but i have a hard time caring about Wale at all considering how many ridiculous little beefs he gets into.

Is there a new wave of aping dancehall sound that were all supposed to be offended about? How upset are these guys going to be when they learn The Clash exist?

The correct amount of upset. Sandinista! blows. London Calling halfway tolerable at best.

Magnificent Seven rocks my cock off.

Ugh, gross.

Wouldn't want to beef with this guy

Holy shit is that a real pic of him? Meme man's pretty buff

fo sho fo sho, when he ain't bulkin' he hidin' some real juice under dem flannels

fo sho fo sho, when he isn't bulking he's hiding some real juice under dem flannels

I don't understand. Are you under the impression that you lose muscle when bulking?

I was referring to his current state of lush thiccness. He's still packing heat under all that. Don't mistake it for anything else. When he's ripped the Guns come out to play :)

he sayin dat chu look fat when u bulk fam 💯

No

Nah, too much hair.

It literally looks nothing like him

I know. I was being meta post-ironic fambro.

Never let the /s fags get to you man.

That picture is by far the funniest thing I will see all day

Even though that's fake, Wale aint really all that intimidating. Noodle arms right there.

I'd say Anthiccy Fatano has got at least 50 lbs on this guy.

SEAL vs WALE

Isn't Heems known to be like super racist?

im pretty sure fantano is wrong about the basic claim here but he still might win on bantz alone, because he brought some fuckin bantz

Tbh Fantano is probably right about his original claim. Even if Wale's song is "authentically" afrobeat, and even if there were some clear, unambiguous distinction between afrobeat and Caribbean music, the overwhelming majority of people who listen to the song probably aren't even aware of what afrobeat is, and are probably just gonna think it sounds Caribbean.

It's not really of consequence if it's not actually Caribbean, since most listeners are gonna think it's Caribbean anyways. And in order to cash in on the Caribbean craze, all you gotta do is seem vaguely Caribbean to listeners.

i feel like it's of consequence on his part, though. if you're billing yourself as an authority, which any professional critic inherently is, you should be able to make those distinctions, or at least not double down on being wrong about them. like the whole dispute is over utterly pedantic nerd shit, but it's part of fantano's job to be a pedantic nerd

This is better than the white hipster appropriators of a few years ago. Save music, something something mayocide.

listening to wale in the 21st century

stay pleb

Why the fuck do people need a long ass video review of an album, just listen to it and decide yourself. I'm siding with Wale on this one, even if that song does suck my balls

His reviews are entertaining imo. Check out the review he did for Corey Feldman.

Habadat.

Kill them all.

Also, stealing this of course.

Wale isn't even Nigerian in any meaningful sense. It's not "his" culture just because his parents happen to come from there. Plenty of American mayos have Irish or Italian or whatever parents, but we all (rightfully) call them weirdos when they claim that they're actually Irish or Italian owing merely to their genetic lineage.

Caribbean craze ????

Well yeah he reviews albums for a living

no he makes meme reviews for a living

Im more interested in the fact that Wale lurks Reddit posting in a wwe subreddit.