DaBaby Says Backlash to AIDS Comments Was a 'Blessing in Disguise'

Rapper DaBaby is now acknowledging that his hateful comments about the gay community have caused him to grow.

During a July 2021 performance at the Rolling Loud music festival, DaBaby went on a hateful and ignorant rant about people living with HIV. While he was performing, he told his audience to put their cell phone lights up if they “didn’t show up today with HIV or AIDS or any of them deadly sexually transmitted diseases that will make you die in two to three weeks” and “if you didn’t suck a n**** dick in the parking lot.”

Almost immediately, DaBaby started losing bookings and opportunities. He lost his ongoing collaboration with BoohooMan, was dropped from the UK’s Parklife Festival, and was dropped from both Lollapalooza and the Governor’s Ball.

Now, the rapper has said that the experience was actually “a blessing in disguise.”

“Who is to say where I would be mentally and spiritually had I not been forced to sit my ass down and self-reflect? Because I still didn’t sit down when it took place,” DaBaby said on Shannon Sharpe’s Club Shay Shay podcast.

“I’m fighting it like, ‘Hell nah, that ain’t what it is. I’m telling y’all that ain’t what it is.’ God knows I’m a good fighter, but he was like ‘Yeah, you a good fighter, but sit yo ass down,’” he said. “Even when I was getting what I was getting, I had what I had in the bank, this and that, I wasn’t happy as a person. Right now I’m not tripping.”

“I really feel like that’s a blessing in disguise at this point in my life and I just came to that realization in the past two weeks. I really feel like I needed the season that I had to endure,” he continued. “That’s going to make me way happier a person and make me that much more of a man for the rest of my life.”