Hey, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, the internet's busiest music nerd.

I want to talk about what I think is the worst thing right now. There's been a voice, a figure, an artist that despite my best efforts, I have not been able to avoid seeing on social media constantly these days. And no, I'm not talking about Kanye West, whose tweets as of late, are somehow getting even worse.

No, I'm talking about Utah rapper, singer, and songwriter, Mr. Dave Blunts, whose fame and popularity and success so far in his career doesn't necessarily bewilder me, but I do find it very disappointing that not only has he made it this far into his career to where he's getting booked on serious festival stages and just dropped a brand new album. But there also seems to be a serious team of people behind him making sure that he is constantly talked about, posted about, across the hip hop social media sphere.

Now, if you're unfamiliar with Dave, or even if you are familiar with Dave, one of the first things that you notice about the guy is that he is a large man, which in and of itself is not inherently a bad thing in or outside of music. I've been overweight. I know people who are overweight, and certainly there are a fair ammount of famous and legendary rappers who are on the big side. In fact, some of them have even put it in their stage names. Fat Joe didn't just call himself Fat Joe for nothing.

However, where Dave Blunts makes his weight a central point of his appeal, his brand, his songwriting, too. The guy just can't seem to spit a verse without mentioning how fat he is or how it's impacting his life in some way. And I feel like this angle could be respectable if he was relating to or talking about some struggle with this or using his platform to create some, I don't know, greater understanding about people who might be going through a similar experience. But the way Dave uses his weight in his songwriting and his social media branding, too, it just basically is used to invite criticism and ridicule and hatred and vitriol.

And this goes beyond just the music. If you peruse Dave's social media and the various headlines about him across music websites. You'll see that he is posted about repeatedly being in and out of the hospital, having various sorts of health scares and stuff like that. He even performed a Juice WRLD Day while sitting on a couch and connected to an oxygen tank.

Now, when stuff like this is posted to social media, you do have to wonder sometimes, how much of this is real, how much of this is being posted in order to get a reaction out of people. Real or not, this stuff is being persistently shared and thrown in people's faces as a means of eliciting a response of some sort, and honestly, further dehumanizes him. You only need to look at one single comment section, either under an Instagram post or some performance video of Dave Blunts, to see this guy is essentially being paraded around like he's some side show for people to laugh at, boo at, and throw tomatoes at.

Now, with all that being said, I am not here to talk about Dave Blunts purely as some sympathetic character who's being exploited and used and laughed at for monetary gain, not only because Dave is a fully sentient adult who is in total control of his own destiny and decisions. But Dave himself has made it clear that he doesn't really care about his well-being and health, too, which is also obviously another way to get people to ridicule him, either by making reference to his love of food or his biggest song and single that is wildly viral.

And there are videos of him performing this live and the audience singing the lyrics back at him. The track is about just drinking too much cough syrup and how he can't put the cup down, which I feel like I could do a whole another video about the fact that this guy has been invited to perform at Juice WRLD Day, which on the surface is offensive just based off the fact that he is musically a far more mediocre version of Juice WRLD. When it comes to doing this sing-songy emo trap, combo blend sound, he absolutely sucks at it.

But what's even more ridiculous is that we would have this man on the stage celebrated at a festival for a music icon whose vices and addictions essentially took him from us. Instead of using that as an opportunity to create more awareness around this subject as an issue, we are instead platforming a guy who arguably is even more self-destructive and has essentially made the idea that he could die any day now a part of his brand.

Obviously, I don't wish that on Dave Blunts as much as I dislike him, and I'll get more into why that is, but honestly, that's a pretty fucking depraved way to promote your music. Now look, I've just said I don't really like Dave Blunts, and that is true, however, this goes beyond just, I think, his music being painfully mediocre and him making bad decisions that affect pretty much nobody else but him.

Another big issue with Dave, and this becomes an even larger problem when you actually dig into the deep cuts on his new album here, is that he repeatedly uses his songs to make fun of and hate on people who are different than him, most specifically those in the LGBTQ community. There are so many damn F slurs on this record and hateful bars toward trans people. It's honestly surprising that somebody on a rap record in 2025 would go out of their way this much to over and over and over and over just shit on people repeatedly for having a different sexual orientation than you do.

And to go back to some of my earlier comments, I just find all of this insanely disappointing because this man clearly has an audience of some sort. People are consuming his music, listening to his songs, memorizing them, engaging with everything he does. And I'm just sitting here wondering what person is excited to hear about Dave freaking Blunts. Not only is the music on his shit. The content is shit as well as hateful. Many of the bars just make him out to be a massive fucking loser. I mean, literally in the sense that he's shitting on himself. There are bars on the first several tracks of this record where he's talking about, oh, man, all the sex he has and all the women he gets and so on and so forth. Then just moments later, he admits to lying about all of that and how he essentially pays women for various sexual interactions because of how much of a loser he is, which like, yeah, man, we know.

All of these aspects culminate into Dave Blunts, for me, essentially being hip hop's first real and true lolcow, essentially a figure who just exists for people to laugh at and hate on and shit on, which for sure the genre has had a fair amount of those across its existence. However, in most cases, when we're talking about figures like, I don't know, Tekashi 6ix9ine, for example, usually those guys start out making bangers, and they develop into lolcows later after they've lost a lot of their mojo and their motion. And then the only reason you see them after that point is just to laugh at the terrible things happening to them or them looking like awkward morons on social media.

But this is literally how Dave Blunts is kicking off his career, being a dumb, hateful, self-destructive bigot who clearly doesn't like himself and as a result wants to take the hate that is being thrown at him, that he is also inviting, mind you, and then hoist it onto other people who are just sitting there doing nothing other than just existing. It's a real gross cycle that he is voluntarily engaging in here. And once more, it just makes you wonder, who the hell is consuming this and why? And it's just disappointing to see all of this money and production and attention and posting and effort going into a music act that is very much not about the music.

And also the album I've been talking about up until this point that he just dropped, unlistenable. I could barely make it through the damn thing without cringing every 30 seconds. All I can say is that I'm really glad that on the front cover here, he is just merely photoshopped into this depicted classroom because given some of the bars on this record, Dave Blunts should be nowhere near a school.

And if your children are somehow listening to this guy, and I have no doubt that this guy's audience skews very young, you need to get your fucking head checked or, I don't know, look into what your kids are doing on social media.

Yeah, I think I'm going to leave it there. If you've had the displeasure of this man and his music existing on your feed in some way, let me know what you think. I'm sure you will.

Anthony Fantano, Dave Blunts, no.