Music Criticism in Video Form

In short, Fantano may have discerned from the popularity of his friends like Sam Hyde and Sargon of Akkad — not to mention his own icon status on /mu/ — that a market existed for reactionary video content.

this is really what it comes down to with most of these reactionary pivots. gamergate cracked open this massive White Nationalist Incel demographic and every scumsucker with a platform swam right into it. i don't think it's a case of anyone being "redpilled". i'm not sure people like fantano or pewdiepie or ian miles cheong actually believe in anything outside of themselves

qualx OTM

ive seen this dudes music reviews sitting on the sidelines forever and i dont know that ive ever clicked on one before and now i feel vindicated bc what a fucking creep

on a purely aesthetic level why would anyone want to look at people like af and pewdiepie let alone listen to their opinions

Like, is he truly that lame?

I followed him on tumblr back in the day (never been interested in vlogs), he would say the odd anti-sjw anti-gamergate thing every now and then but he'd sometimes call out racist messages he got sent to him around the time To Pimp a Butterfly came out. I never liked his politics but he wasn't nearly as bad as his godawful 94% male fanbase. It looks like he's totally gone down the alt-right rabbit hole now though

So yeah, i'm glad the fader is calling out his bullshit

the main thought i have of him is still people making fun of him on tumblr for having hentai displayed on his blog through his likes

can't believe a guy who makes a living shouting reductive thoughts about music turned out to be a bad person

I am deeply, deeply suspicious of anyone who uploads themselves to youtube and always have been.

the best illustration of just how far gone this particular YouTube/Let's Play/etc crowd is, for me, was when a commenter called one LP guy "far-left" for saying he supported Obama. some fuckin' karl marx shit right there

Words on a page is one thing I can more or less manage, the idea of people speaking their thoughts out loud is corrosive to well being

this is about music, nobody wants to look at people speaking, find another art form for that

also

this isn't entirely true, since theneedledrop is partnered with Complex Media. it's unlikely that Complex has any real editorial authority over his reviews (these partnerships usually amount to 'you give us a share of your ad revenue, and in return we do virtually nothing to promote your channel'), but it would be naive to assume that Fantano is an independent youtuber.

― small doug yule carnival club (unregistered), Friday, March 4, 2016 12:43 PM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is this still true

there's also, imo, something to the alt-right being enamored with charismatic personalities (obviously they're not the *only* ones, but it is a pretty consistent trait, and of course are all sorts of parallels you could tease out of that trait), and the only "pivots to video" that actually work for media being the one driven by charismatic personalities with large fanbases.

(once again, games might end up being the canary in the coalmine for this kind of thing -- I remember, when the Nick Robinson stuff happened, suspecting it would not be the last time. the traits that make shitty and/or abusive people function -- charisma, etc. -- are very transferable skills to media)

In July, 2016, Fantano appeared in a video called “QUESTIONS WHITE MEN HAVE FOR SJWs!” Posted and commission by TJ Kirk, also known as the Amazing Atheist, it brought together a group of prominent political YouTubers: Sargon of Akkad, a talking suit of armor called the Armoured Skeptic, and an anthropomorphic kangaroo called Atheism is Unstoppable.

wtf

Good question.

Just want to add that this gamergate/4chan and now alt right sphere is so fucking creepy and if ever a subculture needed to die this is it.

xp katherine

the thing I can never figure out is who is it who finds assholes like AF charismatic

People who find racist trolling an amusing past-time

Just want to add that this gamergate/4chan and now alt right sphere is so fucking creepy and if ever a subculture needed to die this is it.

good thing no-one whose views overlap with these shitlords are currently working the levers of power in the united states of america, phew

People who find racist trolling an amusing past-time

Fantano built up a pretty huge fanbase before the alt-right was even a proper thing though, and as established earlier itt the overt heel turn was pretty recent

Other assholes. Of whom there are a lot.

Just want to add that this gamergate/4chan and now alt right sphere is so fucking creepy and if ever a subculture needed to die this is it.
― Treeship, Wednesday, October 4, 2017 9:20 AM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what we're seeing now is 4chan kiddies turning into adults

True. But according to the Fader, the pivot was encouraged by the fact that there was a big overlap between his 94% male(!) fanbase and the alt right.

there is something in the "I am a master logician" - nu atheist - proving ur inferiority with algebra crowd that ties into the kind of "objective cataloguing" approach of a Fantano imo - the will to crush subjectivity under an ersatz analytical rigour

Xp simon. I've gotten so slow.

I feel like I want to blame RYM a little bit for some reason.

it is part of the same bullshit to me. I realise fans of criticism as filing may feel differently.

All the aggregators -- metacritic etc -- definitely contributed to this tendency to evaluate art as just another commodity, along the lines of user enjoyment rather than any kind of respect for the work in itself.

which, y'know, is part of a very old and dishonourable teenage boy tradition, "proving" the superiority of yr own malformed beliefs

there's definitely something to want to boil down art criticism to a numbers game and how it facilitates a poisonous discourse, see also Rotten Tomatoes/Metacritic (xp!!)

I Rate Everything.

this isn't entirely true, since theneedledrop is partnered with Complex Media. it's unlikely that Complex has any real editorial authority over his reviews (these partnerships usually amount to 'you give us a share of your ad revenue, and in return we do virtually nothing to promote your channel'), but it would be naive to assume that Fantano is an independent youtuber.

― small doug yule carnival club (unregistered), Friday, March 4, 2016 12:43 PM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is this still true

― sick, fucking funny, and well tasty (katherine), Wednesday, October 4, 2017 10:01 AM (forty-two minutes ago)

I think so. according to Socialblade, his review channel and his edgelord channel are both signed with Complex. it's pretty low of Complex to profit off of his bullshit even if it's true that youtube ended up demonetizing his more controversial videos.

https://socialblade.com/youtube/user/theneedledrophttps://socialblade.com/youtube/user/thatistheplan

like the core of his fanbase has been /mu/ & reddit types from the start, it's not surprising that he'd move to further capitalise on that, or that the undercurrents would become more explicit as they have elsewhere

(xpost -- his second channel was signed with Complex as far back as last November, but I'm not sure if his videos were monetized at that point)

yeah, GG just weaponized/took nuclear a group of people that already existed. (in games, this group of people was around doing more or less the same shit at smaller scale since dickwolves at least)

ugh. I had forgotten about the whole dickwolves thing.

also is there a name I can h/t you by for that socialblade link

(this is the fifth time I said "also" but the reason I bring games stuff up so often is that I'm in that scene)

also is there a name I can h/t you by for that socialblade link

"Jason" would be fine, lol

Fantano actually admits here that he's affiliated with Complex, but I'm not the first person to point that out

the bit comparing Fantano to a middle-schooler seems pretty OTM to me. he doesn't really strike me as being as malicious or committed as the Gamergate crowd, more like "anything for a good shitpost", the sort who'd try to argue "no we're actually MOCKING the bad guys, don't you see". dude just wants to transfer his living essence into a meme.

nothing about any of his supposed 'shifts' has been at all surprising to me, just from having seen what music he covered, how he talked about it and so forth in the few reviews of his i could stomach when he was getting started.

even then questions like "does this guy post on /mu/?" "does this guy avidly use rym?" "does this guy find racist memes amusing?" "does this guy think feminism is cancer?" "does this guy believe that encouraging people to treat each other with empathy is 'authoritarianism'?" etc would have been pathetically easy to answer accurately

how malicious or intentional he is is irrelevant imo

internet is so creepy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkUxFB6jbDc

i refuse to click on that

like I needed another reason to hate this guy lol

all this 4Chan/reddit/vlogger meme-dominated shit - where do these people even find the time to follow/catalog/participate in it all? It all strikes me as the kind of shit that only people with no jobs/children have time for. Like, explicitly the province of young men with too much time on their hands.

He's probably one of the 5 highest paid music critics in the world if that gives you some idea of how and why he finds the time

yeah I don't mean him specifically, since he's made an actual career out of it

how much is Armoured Skeptic paid