Okay, guys, we've got to talk about a really interesting video clip that came across my desk this past weekend. It came off of the Bootleg Kev Show. A shout out to him, a great music journalist out there on the music scene, on the hip hop scene specifically for years at this point.

Does a lot of super solid interviews. He recently nailed down one with Clipse, whose new record is out now. I've been listening to it myself – been enjoying it. We'll review it ASAP. I recommend it.

I wanted to get into this bit of the interview around the 18-minute mark where the topic of reviews comes up.

"This is just all an ode to rap and rap journalism and music journalism and being critiqued and putting out your music, letting people hear your shit. You know what I'm saying? Facing it, facing your product. Getting in front of it, not throwing it in hiding. Be in front with facing with your product, man. And I think that's something that we miss. I think I asked about two weeks ago, like, man, I wanted to see the reviews. Gabe came as a PR, he came back and was like, 'it's only like three publications still doing that type of thing. I want to see all that." - Clipse

"It's like Anthony Fantano on YouTube now. He's like that bald white dude. He's like, hard 8." - Bootleg Kev

"But I want to see that, too. If you're taking the time to critique and you're really really well-versed. If you're really well-versed in the music and the craft and know the history, you should be speaking on it." - Clipse

Okay, yeah. Obviously, I'm very flattered to have been brought up in such a conversation. But with that being said, I would like to talk about what this interaction says about the greater world of reviewing and music opinions.

Because, yeah, it is true that music reviews are not quite the force – they're not quite as prevalent as they once were in the music journalism world. And there's also a lot of hostility out there toward people who go the extra mile to formally review an album, especially if they are very critical of it from fans of the record, or song, or artists, that is being critiqued, sometimes from the artist themselves.

But here you have two seasoned veterans of the music game who are like, actually, we want our music to be reviewed. We want our music to be talked about, even if you're going to say, 'Hey, it's actually not that good, and we're not that interested in it.'

You have artists here actually asking to be analyzed in some way, shape, or form, and And given how well the Clipse album rollout has been going so far, and given how little major reviews there actually are out there for Clipse to get for this record, which undoubtedly they will receive because this album is going to be covered. It's one of the biggest album releases of this week.

They're not really in a position where they need to be asking for or seeking out this coverage for the record, and yet they are anyway. I just find it unfortunate that we are currently in an age where culturally, and I'll say business-wise, as far as music journalism goes, where we're not really meeting this moment, where we need as many in-depth reviews of an album like this new Clipse record that we can possibly get even if they're not all positive.

Because we're talking about a genre and a group here and a record that is so heavily and deeply context dependent, not only because of the history behind Clipse that I feel like a lot of the time needs to be fully understood in order to truly grasp the gravity of this new album, but also all of the history behind Pharrell's production on the record. The variety of reference points throughout this new in its lyrics, what Clipse means in the context of the Virginia music scene, hip hop from the 2000s more broadly.

I just feel like we're not really in a place where music fans across the board can access that thing efficiently or readily or in a way where they know they're getting it from a place, a platform, an outlet that they can really trust.

Now, a lot of people would say this is because music reviews are pointless now, and they're dead, and the format is on its way out. Why seek out an opinion on an album when you can just go listen to the album yourself? Which I think is a pretty brain dead take, frankly, because if we don't need music opinions anymore because we can just log on to the internet and listen to any album that we want at any given time. Why would there be any music opinions at all being posted to the internet anywhere, much less on YouTube or on Pitchfork or on Rolling Stone?

If you log on to Twitter or TikTok or really any user-based content social media platform, you could spend all day consuming hours of various music opinions and then dig even deeper and read and consume all the opinions and reaction to those opinions.

So clearly, a lot of music opinions are still happening, and giving as many people as much access to listening to as much music as they want as possible has not eliminated that. In fact, it's probably only created more opinionated people because they have more things to listen to, to be opinionated in response to.

And honestly, I think it's a pretty cool thing that access to platforms where you can voice an opinion on different issues, music specifically for the purposes of this conversation, I think that's pretty cool. It provides more opportunities for access to differing opinions and different perspectives.

However, I think as of late, the well is progressively getting more and more poisoned in many of these spaces, especially on Twitter. And that's for a variety of reasons. And I could spend all day listing them, but some of the most major ones are that the monetary incentives are messed up.

You have accounts that are out here getting paid to promote and endorse things, but make it look like to the follower, to the reader, that it's just being endorsed out of passion or because the person using that account is genuinely a fan when it's essentially a paid advertisement or paid promo.

But even without that dynamic at play, the fact that paid accounts are able to make money on Twitter has worsened a lot of the music discourse as well. And that's not to advocate against content creators being paid on all the platforms that they actually make relevant every day. They absolutely should.

But the way Twitter and its algorithms work, very clearly, it incentivizes controversy, hot takes, hatred, and negativity. So as a result, you just have all of these super bullshit low-level dismissive opinions flying out there about everything that are not in-depth, they're not interesting. And this is basically what we're currently accepting as the baseline of what music discourse should be. And honestly, It sucks. It sucks ass.

You can actually break outside the algorithmic music opinion matrix and just go out there and start your own thing and start your own account, and start building a fan base, building a viewer base. It's going to be slow. It's going to be gradual. You're going to get some dismissive reactions here and there. Not everyone is going to like every take that you have to say, especially if you stick to your guns and you're being honest about how you feel.

You're just not going to like everything. I mean, it's just how life goes. But even though it's not easy putting yourself out there a little bit, especially if you feel like you do have something substantive to say, I think that's better than just accepting the fate of slowly watching music discourse get whittled down to a bunch of paid bot accounts that just say shit because they're either getting a check from a PR person or or a label, or they're just trying to say something that's going to whip a bunch of people up into a frenzy.

Again, it's difficult. It's not easy, especially in this day and age. I mean, while it did take a lot of work to get to where I am right now, I do feel fortunate to have been able to start in the time that I did. What's going to happen when I and everyone else who is currently doing long-form analysis and reviews of music dies? It's just going to go away forever. We're just not going to look at things in-depth anymore.

And I'm not even saying I'm the most in-depth thinker when it comes to music ever in the world. I mean, you can debate about the level of substance that goes into any one of my reviews, and I know it varies for sure. I've done thousands of them at this point. Not every review is going to be a great one, I guess.

I feel like the field should be a bit wider. There's room to grow. It would be refreshing see more people coming up and really going for it because I think there's more of a demand for it than some people are presuming, just because it's very easy and very convenient to get that low level of stupid, dumbass, random hate tweet level of commentary, you can get access to that candy whenever it is that you want it. But as music fans who both want to say our piece or read somebody else saying their peace, we could do so much better.

But yeah, there you go. I'm going to leave it there. Let me know what you think about all this in the comments. I'm sure you will.

Anthony Fantano, music, opinions, forever.