DaBaby used his new music video to address the controversy over his recent homophobic comments but stopped short of offering an apology for them. At the end of the visual companion to “Giving What It’s Supposed to Give,” the rapper wrote, “Don’t fight hate with hate. My apologies for being me the same way you want the freedom to be you.” He did not, in fact, offer an apology to the LGBTQ community. At the Rolling Loud festival the previous weekend, DaBaby had said to a crowd, “If you didn’t show up today with HIV, AIDS, any of them deadly sexually transmitted diseases that’ll make you die in two or three weeks, put your cellphone light up.” Defending himself on Instagram in the following days, he wrote that his fans did not have AIDS because they “ain’t no nasty gay n---as.” On Twitter on Wednesday, he did apologize to people with AIDS: “Anybody who done ever been effected by AIDS/HIV y’all got the right to be upset, what I said was insensitive even though I have no intentions on offending anybody.” Dua Lipa, who collaborated with DaBaby on a successful remix of her song “Levitating,” said she was “surprised and horrified” by the remarks, as did pop legend Elton John.
