Speaking Easy - A Critique of the Kid Who Cried "Echo Chamber"

(By Melody Werner)

Back in August of last year, a writer for the website Honi Soit (unnamed to discourage harassment--don't fucking harass people for being stupid online, lest karma come back to bite ye for thine cringe) wrote a pretty nonsensical article titled "Fantano (Cult)ure: A critique of the Echo-Chamber". Like many Internet users, this writer lazily christens something (in this case, the fanbase of music reviewer, Anthony Fantano of theneedledrop) as being an "echo chamber". It's a sad thing, as echo chambers do exist and it's a useful term, but I swear to god, 90% of the time it's being used online, it's being used as a barb with little to nothing substantiating the jab. As someone who watches Anthony on a near daily basis, I am unfortunately very familiar with the fanbase, and I can attest that the last thing it is, is an echo chamber.

What's especially bizarre to me is how, between the random personal attacks on Anthony's ability to perform the bass, the writer acknowledges the most obvious instance of Fantano's audience not behaving as an echo chamber--when he rated My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy a 6/10 (twice)--yet sweeps these blatant counterpoints under the rug. What she ignores is the many other times in which Anthony will land outside the public consensus for one reason or another--whether that's DAMN., or Fetch the Bolt Cutters, or Ohms, or Choose Your Weapon, or Swimming, or the debut Lil Pump mixtape, or Lulu, or The Fall of Hobo Johnson. You can't have a goddamned echo chamber where every month the preacher gets relentlessly mauled by his supposed choir.

Our writer seems to attribute nastiness by those attempting to weaponize Anthony's reviews to push whatever disdain or admiration they have for an artist to people being unable to form their own opinions on the records Fantano discusses. She goes into an anecdote of a friend warning that Anthony had disliked a song before that friend played it--which is very reasonable to me. Anthony is not part of an "echo chamber"--he is widely seen as a tastemaker, whom you can learn what you can safely avoid and what to not let slip past your radar from. If you largely agree with him, "hey, I know Antknee hated this, but I think it's great and worth trying," is a fair heads-up. And, as with any tastemaker, all of that cuts both ways--if you have the polar opposite taste of his, you can generally get a good feel for things because if he hates all of the djent or bedroom pop that you love, chances are that you'll really enjoy the next djent bedroom pop LP he slaps with a NOT GOOD. Anthony's fanbase is full of folks who know their tastes on this band or that musician will not align with his, but they openly still want to see his thoughts on their latest work.

Tch, have you seen how all of the cringelords in his comments come out to hate on Cardi B whenever he praises "WAP"?

As a "Fantano cultist", I personally find a lot of music that I love but never would've listened to otherwise: Spellling, Zeal & Ardor, Quadeca, that Sharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen power ballad ("Like I Used To"), Black Dresses, Megan Thee Stallion, Drive Like Jehu, Jasiah, Bree Runway, Tkay Maidza, Johnny Manchild & The Poor Bastards, Backxwash. But I am not above disagreeing with that fucking melon; such is the duality of man, or whatever. For starters, I think he did Athena by Sudan Archives (another artist I only learned of through the weekly track review) dirty, that is a lush as hell album. Anthony generally isn't very impressed by NIKI (another one), while I am. I also do not get his relative distastes for Deftones, Wolf Alice, and Hiatus Kaiyote. Not to mention, I tend to enjoy albums more than him. As far as I'm concerned, Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides by SOPHIE (RIP), Meliora by Ghost, Peaceful as Hell by Black Dresses, RTJ4 by Run the Jewels, Stranger Fruit by Zeal & Ardor, and Ctrl by SZA are 10/10 albums, and he doesn't, though he likes all of those albums to one degree or another. But there are inevitably albums he thinks deserve that rating, that recognition, which I don't. (And that's not even getting into our fundamental disagreement in what amounts to a 10/10; I think something which is a cutting edge exemplar in its genre which evokes strong emotions and/or thought, and that I don't think someone else could make--basically what I think is gonna be deemed classic in 20, 30 years--while he wants something which blows his gourd and feels that there's a soft cap on how many albums he'd give a 10 in a year.) That's great! Enjoying music is wholly subjective, and as long as people don't act like hobgoblins when someone disagrees with some innocuous opinion on a song/album/musician/band/what-the-fuck-ever, those kinds of differing philosophies are what make talking about music a fun pastime.

But I cannot express just how much I despise when people invoke echo chambers without having the facts to back that up. "Hut, echo chamber" is such an insipid cliché that is overwhelmingly cast upon arenas which are so intradivided that anyone with a firsthand understanding will tell you that it is fucking ridiculous to paint them all as drones touting the same arguments. Like when rightoids say that "the left" (what even is that?) is an "echo chamber". And, it's like, I'm a leftist--so, dipshit, I know for a fact that we all hate each other and are always barreling down each others' throats. So when someone calls Fantano's following this... with all due respect, it's almost as nonsensical. I think, memes aside, that virtually anyone watching Fantano for serious musical discussion will tell you that--if anything--he has gotten a lot of us out of our comfort zones, in one way or another, with insightful and accessible reviews that encourage us as viewers to think more about the music we listen to.

Newsflash: that's not how echo chambers work.