Anthony Fantano First Hip Hop Review: discover the truth now

The origin story of modern digital album reviews

Straight answer up front, because this deserves honesty instead of a made-up headline: there’s no single confirmed video that’s documented as Anthony Fantano’s very first hip hop review. Here’s why, and here’s what actually is confirmed and dated.

Fantano’s project started as a text blog in fall 2007, tied to a WNPR radio show of the same name, before he moved into video reviews in early 2009. That’s well documented. What’s not fully documented is a clean list of his earliest videos by genre, because a large chunk of that early catalog is gone. Fan researchers on sites like the Lost Media Wiki have tracked this directly — <cite index=”25-1″>an archive of his channel from June 2010 shows 240 total uploads at that point, but only a fraction of those videos, including reviews for artists like Animal Collective, Fever Ray, and Sunn O))), are still findable today.</cite> <cite index=”25-1″>Roughly 160 of those early videos are considered lost, with Fantano himself saying he no longer has the original files for many of them.</cite>

So instead of guessing which one was hip hop and calling it “the first,” here’s the honest version of the timeline, built from what’s actually confirmed.

How early video essays shaped the internet hip hop review community

The clearest, best-documented hip hop landmark on the channel isn’t from 2009 — it’s from 2012, and it’s a much bigger deal than a “first review” would’ve been anyway. <cite index=”13-1″>When Sacramento hip hop group Death Grips released The Money Store in 2012, Fantano gave it a 10/10 — the first perfect score the channel had ever handed out, three years into its existence.</cite> That single video is widely credited as a turning point, both for the channel and for how “internet music criticism” treated experimental hip hop as something worth taking seriously next to indie rock and electronic music.

<cite index=”13-1″>Fantano’s essay-style, jargon-heavy review format helped push the popularization of that more experimental strain of hip hop, and it made him something of a catalyst for wider interest in artists working outside the mainstream lane.</cite> <cite index=”13-1″>That approach later helped artists like Danny Brown, Charli XCX, and FKA Twigs cross over into more mainstream listening rotations, largely through his channel’s reach.</cite>

The community angle matters just as much as any single review. Fantano didn’t build hip hop credibility alone — he built it partly by working with people already inside that space. <cite index=”14-1″>In 2012, The Needle Drop teamed up directly with Dead End Hip Hop for a joint review of the Roots’ album Undun, which is one of the earliest documented examples of his channel formally collaborating with a dedicated hip hop outlet rather than just reviewing hip hop albums solo.</cite> That kind of crossover — a general music critic and a hip hop–specific channel reviewing the same record together — was still a fairly new format for YouTube at the time, and it’s part of why his channel ended up so tied to the genre’s online discourse going forward.

By the time the channel hit its stride in the early 2010s, hip hop wasn’t a side genre for Fantano — it was central to his identity as a critic. <cite index=”21-1″>He’s described in artist databases simply as an American music critic and internet personality running TheNeedleDrop</cite>, and hip hop reviews have made up a huge share of his back catalog ever since, to the point where entire fan-run databases now exist just to track every score he’s ever given, searchable by genre and rating.

None of this means the “first hip hop review” question is unanswerable forever — it just means it’s currently unverifiable because of how much early footage YouTube’s old copyright takedown policies wiped out. If you’re deep enough into Fantano lore to want the actual earliest hip hop video, the Lost Media Wiki community is genuinely the best place to check, since they’re actively trying to recover exactly that kind of footage from old mirrors and downloads.

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If you learned something from this, share it with another Fantano fan — especially anyone who’s ever gone looking for those missing 2009 videos and come up empty.