Just days after making homophobic comments at Rolling Loud Festival in Miami on July 25, representatives for rapper DaBaby reached out to the promoters of seven fall festivals that had booked the Charlotte, N.C., rapper and assured them an apology would be forthcoming. DaBaby was planning to tape a short video that would be played before he took the stage at Lollapalooza in Chicago on Sunday, Aug. 1, in which he would deliver a heartfelt apology to the LGBTQ+ community for his distasteful remarks during his set in Miami the previous weekend.
The video would make up for DaBaby’s lackluster apology on July 27 (two days after his Rolling Loud set) where he brushed off complaints by LGBTQ+ activists, writing on Twitter, “I ain’t trippin on y’all, do you. y’all business is y’all business.” The remarks only amplified public outcry that DaBaby be dropped from his upcoming gigs, and on July 28, reps for DaBaby’s camp assured the various festival promoters on his upcoming tour that the video he was creating to air before his set at Lollapalooza would be a sincere apology.
But the video never arrived. On Sunday morning, Lollapalooza issued a statement via social media, saying, “DaBaby will no longer be performing at Grant Park tonight.” As the day wore on, news began to trickle out that DaBaby’s camp had missed its deadline to deliver the apology video to Lollapalooza organizers C3 Presents and Live Nation. Rapper Young Thug would now perform in DaBaby’s time slot instead.
On Monday morning, organizers of Governors Ball in New York and promoters with Day N Vegas each announced they were dropping DaBaby from the event’s lineup, followed by news DaBaby was losing his headline spot at the Can’t Wait Live! benefit concert in Philadelphia and Manchester U.K.’s Parklife Festival. The following day, DaBaby was dropped from the bill of the iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas, Music Midtown in Atlanta and ACL Fest in Austin, Texas.
Still on the calendar for DaBaby is an Aug. 14 concert in Bonner Springs, Kansas; Hot 97 Summer Jam in East Rutherford, N.J., on Aug. 22; and a Sept. 4 concert at Fiddler’s Green near Denver for radio station KS 107.5 F.M. In April, DaBaby announced he was dropping off of the Leeds and Reading festival for 2021; DaBaby was originally booked to play the U.K. festivals in 2020 but would not be performing in 2021 “due to circumstances out of the artists’ control,” a statement from the festivals explained.
DaBaby eventually did deliver a second apology via a formal statement on Instagram posted Monday, writing, “I want to apologize to the LGBTQ+ community for the hurtful and triggering comments I made. Again, I apologize for my misinformed comments about HIV/AIDS and I know education on this is important. Love to all. God bless.”
DaBaby’s management and his booking agent, Andrew Lieber with MAC Agency, declined to comment.
