Daniel Caesar has admitted he was wrong for his 2019 rant about Black people, after he came to the defense of caucasian influencer YesJulz.
Speaking to Apple Music 1‘s Nadeska in an interview published on Friday (April 7), the Canadian singer-songwriter discussed the backlash he faced for supporting YesJulz (real name Julieanna Goddard) after disrespectful comments she made about Scottie Beam and Karen Civil.
AD LOADING...
In addition to her remarks about the Black influencers — who called her out for exploiting Black culture — YesJulz also came under fire for tweeting a picture of a t-shirt with the slogan “N-ggas lie a lot” across the front, and asking her followers if she was allowed to wear it at a festival.
Daniel Caesar then took to IG Live to defend his friend, while admitting that he was intoxicated and said he was “trying to get canceled.”
AD LOADING...
“Why are we being so mean to Julz?” he asked his followers. “Why are we being so mean to white people right now? That’s a serious question. 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.
“White people have been mean to us in the past, yeah, but what are you going to do about it? Tell me what you’re going to do about that? There’s no answer, other than creating and understanding and keeping it moving. You have to bridge that gap.”
AD LOADING...
In his interview with Apple Music 1, Caesar opened up about the backlash he received for his comments, and how he’s since learned a lot about himself and is pouring the life lessons into his music.
“I completely understand the response,” he told Nadeska. “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. 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. That’s one of those things that the knowledge of that can literally put my mind at ease where I’m like, oh, I did deserve. What happened, happened because I deserved it, because I knocked the domino over and set a course in motion.”
While the public scrutiny came thick and fast, Daniel Caesar said he quickly learned not to care about the opinions of people he doesn’t know.
“You learn not to trust what people on the internet have to say and what people that you don’t know have to say,” he said. “Seeing that people that I do know that I care about, them being hurt, then it’s like, ‘Ah, damn, alright.’ I was like, ‘OK, you know me.’ It’s because it’s seeing that people that know me, because I felt in my — clearly my ego is going out of control.”
AD LOADING...
He continued: “I felt in that moment that I could say what I had said and the context of who I am would be taken into account. But I guess people don’t know who I am. I thought at the time that I was saying something, meaning well, but it didn’t, and it hurt people and I don’t want to hurt anybody. That’s really, that’s not what I do. That’s not what I’m interested in doing.”
Nadeska then pointed out the reason people — especially Black women — were upset with him was because the person he was defending “was someone who we feel like had taken a lot from Black culture and not appreciated it.”
AD LOADING...
Adding that Black women in particular are often disrespected and always feel like they’re underrepresented, Nadeska told Caesar that “no one is speaking up on our behalf.”
“Yeah, it’s really when I think about it, it was like, ‘Yeah, it was the perfect storm, honestly.’ I just mean it’s kind of crazy how awful that was,” he said of her sentiments. “Throughout the process in the last few years it was so often, it’s like, ‘so that was a mistake.'”
“So either we stop playing the game or we keep playing the game. Those are my only options. It’s like people every day, you wake up and they’re like, ‘You should kill yourself.’ It’s like, ‘Alright, I’m going to kill myself’ or ‘I’m going to keep going.'”
Since the incident, Caesar said he’s learned a lot about himself and that he’s pouring it all into his music.
“I just put it all into the music,” he revealed. “And that’s kind of like I was saying like, at this point, after having punished myself, after having been punished, it’s like at this point you got to just keep making music.
AD LOADING...
“I want to make music that leads people somewhere as opposed to music that can pacify them or make them feel good. I want to make music that makes people want to change their life. Truly inspiring music.”
Daniel Caesar’s latest album, NEVER ENOUGH, was released on Friday (April 7). It features the singles “Let Me Go,” “Valentina,” “Unstoppable,” and the Raphael Saadiq-produced “Do You Like Me?”
