Thanks to his long-running series of YouTube-based album reviews under the banner of The Needle Drop, Anthony Fantano is arguably the most famous music critic on the internet. He’s influential enough that Drake, arguably the most popular recording artist of his generation, felt the need to slide into his DMs with some vague, hostile barbs in response to Fantano’s mostly negative reviews of his discography. “Your existence is a light 1. And the 1 is cause you are alive,” Drake wrote, nodding to Fantano’s 10-point scoring system. “And cause you somehow wifed a Black girl. I’m feeling a light to decent 1 on your existence.”

Drake leaked these messages Thursday via his Instagram story after Fantano posted a satirical video about receiving DMs from the rapper. In the eight-minute clip, Fantano announced that he’d received private messages from Drake and proceeded to unveil a lengthy fake correspondence in which Drake acknowledged their differences of opinion and shared a vegan cookie recipe. It’s not quite “The Story Of Adidon,” but it’s pretty funny.

It’s unclear what provoked Drake to message Fantano after a decade-plus of bad reviews from the critic, but Fantano did recently rate Drake’s soft house experiment Honestly, Nevermind as “NOT GOOD.” (The same album inspired our own Tom Breihan to declare, “Drake Is Ridiculous.”)

Check out the DMs and Fantano’s jokey response below.

https://twitter.com/theneedledrop/status/1570630321762349061
https://twitter.com/theneedledrop/status/1570630489131855873