We accept your lukewarm apology, Daniel, because you’re black and we never really stopped listening to your music. 

Mind you, we are the same people who were wishy-washy around R Kelly, OJ Simpson, and Bill Cosby when their dirty laundry was coming to the surface. Hell… Trey Songz is still sipping’ mojitos on a denial island surrounded by his sea of allegations. 

The truth of the matter is that we never stopped listening to Daniel Caesar’s music. When he publicly displayed raccoon-like behavior and basically begged to be canceled, in the back of our minds we knew we would not stop listening to this all too familiar black guy’s music. I say ‘familiar’, because Daniel is legitimately like our cousin; we all have at least one cousin that thinks like this. The dark-skinned male cousins have a warped perception of themselves that ends up being displayed in anti-black behaviors. This is by no means me claiming to know Daniel Caesar’s mentality, however, it does trigger a sense of familiarity in those areas. 

After he defended social media influencer YesJulz who had made several comments antagonizing black women, he then went on to tell the black community to “stop being mean to white people” in a Instagram live stream. His logic behind his stance came from the idea that as people we cannot be so sensitive to a point where the people around us must censor themselves. While I understand the sentiment behind it; it also denies the fact a part of humanity is compassion. The things a neurotypical person says to another is a reflection of the caliber of human that they are. The higher the caliber of human, the more consideration and compassion is applied to their rhetoric.

It actually came as a complete surprise to me when he chose to apologize to the black community before dropping his 2023 album ‘Never Enough’ because the rest of us knew that we would have listened to it anyway. His apology, having been received as ‘half-assed’, was also not much of a surprise to me considering he’s always had a fairly monotonous and aloof personality. What really felt like a win for the black community during this album release gimmick, was the music video for ‘Valentina’, which was pretty much just a delicious display of melanin. 

Daniel Caesar’s emphasis on his glow-up tends to rub me in a complicated way, because his saying that he “used to be ugly” may have been speaking to the anti-black self-hatred that had been instilled in him from a young age that still resurfaces today; just like it has (and still does) for many of us as black people. However, on the other hand, there is something endearing about him discovering his beauty, and having success in his career and even with women. His music has become almost ‘rizz infused’ as he displays an undeniable sensual confidence in songs like ‘Homiesexual’, ‘Frontal Lobe Muzik’, ‘OPEN UP’, and ‘Who Hurt You?’.

I, for one, hope he continues to enjoy his prime, and hope that his newly found black consciousness also persists, because it would be beautiful to see a black man connect with his identity more in the midst of his success, instead of regressing into what we now know as the ‘successful black male’ cliché.