Drake‘s latest industry beef started in off in a most meatless fashion: vegan cookies.
After music critic Anthony Fantano, who runs The Needle Drop, posted a YouTube video on Thursday (Sept. 15) showing the superstar rapper appearing to slide into his DMs to share a vegan cookie recipe (and a number of niceties), Drake fired back, posting a screenshot on Instagram Stories of what he says are the real messages he sent to Fantano.
“Your existence is a light 1. And the 1 is cause you are alive,” read the first of Drizzy’s harsh DMs, referencing Fantano’s own rating scale, followed with, “And cause you somehow wifed a Black girl. I’m feeling a light to decent 1 on your existence.”
Drake’s decision to reveal the conversation in response to Fantano’s trolling cookie video may have been the critic’s plan the entire time. Following the rapper’s screenshots, Fantano hopped on Live to address the beef, saying, “Essentially what happened is that for reasons unknown to me, Drake was in his feelings, as he does tend to be.”
Though Fantano minimized his role in the not-so-nice DM from Drizzy, after a decade plus of the critic’s brutal reviews, it’s easy to understand why one of the best-selling rappers of all time finally clapped back. Even his Nothing Was the Same and Take Care brought in a “light five” and “strong six,” respectively, on Fantano’s scale of 1-10, the latter being described as containing “20 minutes of crap” and “a steak with way too much fat that you gotta cut around to get to the good stuff.”
And while Fantano’s dislike of Drake is nothing new, his latest six-minute scathing review of Honestly, Nevermind as a “not good” out of 10, may have been the straw that broke the musician’s back.
“No hard feelings against Drake,” Fantano concluded on his Instagram Live.
Whether the two will reconcile anytime soon seems unlikely, though Drake’s recent reunion with Ye during their L.A. concert shows the rap icon is capable of letting bygones be bygones.
Watch Fantano’s reaction to Drake’s diss below.