In September 2022, a music critic named Anthony Fantano received a string of angry Instagram D.M.s from Drake. Fantano reviews new albums in short YouTube posts, in which he monologues directly at the camera, standing in front of stacked, cherry-red record shelves. In a recent post, he had likened Drake’s latest release, Honestly, Nevermind, to “a sad solo dance party.” “Your existence is a light 1,” the Canadian rapper clapped back, a reference to Fantano’s practice of rating records on a 1–10 scale. Uncharitable, perhaps. But the fact that Drake—a global superstar who is generally cagey toward journalists—bothered to inveigh against a critic at all spoke to Fantano’s status: He may be one of the few working music critics who can, in this day and age, be conceivably called a tastemaker. It was the sort of ego-first collision of artist and critic that’s in increasingly short supply.
As Paul Gorman details in Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of the Music Press, such encounters used to be more common. The rapport between artist and critic has historically ranged from affable to antagonistic to utterly bizarre. In 1969, in the pages of Melody Maker, Richard Williams accidentally reviewed the blank C- and D-sides of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s experimental Wedding Album, praising the “subliminal, uneven ‘beat’” of the blank records. The slip-up merited an enthusiastic response from the pop power couple, who said that “we both feel like this is the first time a critic topped the artist.”
Elsewhere, critics proved formidable thorns in their subjects’ sides. Legendary critic Lester Bangs once sat for an audience with his hero Lou Reed, only to end up calling him a liar with a “rusty bugeye” and “nursing home pallor.” Nick Cave, Gorman recalls, wrote the vitriolic “Scum” about NME writer Mat Snow (“A miserable shitwringing turd,” in Cave’s estimation). However petty these spats might seem, they spoke to the power of the music critic—or at least their ability to get under the thin skins of pop’s biggest stars. It was a complex, contested, and often symbiotic relationship that, in the words of Q magazine founder David Hepworth, served to make “acts seem exciting and larger than life, even when they weren’t.”