If there’s a “pro” to all the “cons” of lighting your own career on fire as thoroughly and vociferously as DaBaby has, it’s that you can then blame all your troubles on somebody else. It’s a conspiracy! “THEY” are out to get me! You never have to really explain who THEY are, you just have to make your case that you think you deserve forgiveness and point out how unfair it is that no one will extend it to you (never mind the fact that you basically did it to yourself).
That’s exactly what DaBaby is doing now that his new album, Baby On Baby 2, has landed with a thud, underperforming to his own expectations on the charts to the pace of just 16,000 album equivalent units. To be fair, that’s way better than a lot of artists manage (some would say “most”) — but it’s also well below what the original Baby On Baby pulled in in its first week: 124,000 units.
On his Instagram Story, Baby reposted a fan account’s post about his sales pace, writing “Not bad for da BlackBalled Baby.”
Of course, DaBaby hasn’t really spoken to why he was “blackballed“: His homophobic comments at Rolling Loud Miami in 2021 and his utter refusal to seriously apologize or show any follow-through on the promises he’s made to make things right. It’s also not like he promoted Baby On Baby 2 all that well; most fans on Twitter say they were unaware he was even dropping an album until headlines that he’d made distasteful comments about Megan Thee Stallion on it began cropping up on social media. If your main effort to promote a project is controversy-baiting lyrics and Hot Girl lookalikes in your music videos, you aren’t blackballed — people just might be fed up with your sh*t.