Source: Slaven Vlasic / Getty
creating music that’s the backdrop of falling in love, getting married and even the creation of life.
But expressing themselves in real life can be fraught with challenges, as crooner
Daniel Caesar found out the hard way. In 2019, he defended YesJulz for making a joke about wearing a T-shirt that read “N—-s lie a lot.”
On Instagram Live, Caesar caped for social media star Julianna Marie Goddard, better known as
YesJulz, asking why “Black people are so mean to white people?”
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“That’s a serious question,” he added. “Why is it that we’re allowed to be disrespectful and rude to everybody else and when anybody returns any type of energy to us. That’s not equality. I don’t wanna be treated like I can’t take a joke.”
Caesar, born in Canada to Jamaican parents, also said that “being a victim doesn’t get you paid.” He went on to say, “I’ve said what I’ve said before and y’all tried to cancel me and I apologized like a b—h.”
“I don’t believe in that shit ’cause I think you guys are wrong and I think I’m right…and you can cancel me. Don’t listen to my next shit if you think I’m s–t…Make me broke, make me suffer for my opinion. I believe in it.”
It appears that Twitter took the two-time Grammy-winner at his word. The backlash may not have completely “canceled” him but certainly altered his standing with his Black fans. It would be four more years before he released another album.
Though he
apologized shortly after for how he expressed his “idea,” calling it “pretentious and tyrannical,” he said he still believed he was right.
Now, Caesar says that he’s learned the error of his ways, but Twitter is, well, skeptical, especially because Caesar released his third studio album
Never Enough a month ago.
He told Nadeska Alexis of Apple Music that he now regrets his comments. “I completely understand the response (apology begins at 11:14). And in time, after taking time to get over myself and to really honestly look at myself and everything that was happening, I was wrong.”
He continued, “I was wrong, and I’m sorry about that. For a long time, I was like, ‘You can’t do anything, you can’t say anything without whatever. You can do and say whatever you want, but it’s like for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. And that’s physics. That’s science.”
Though Twitter has decreed the new album
Never Enough, a hit, responses to the apology are much more mixed.
See the reactions below:
