Once a video or a photo is up online, its digital track will stay online until the end of time. Sometimes, it haunts its owner back years or even decades later.
Recently, a series contained an alt-right controversial and unreleased song, live stream, and homophobic tweets struck the career of internet sensation Doja Cat real hard. However, the Say So singer refused to partake in any racist chat in the past.
"As for the old song that's resurfaced, it was in no way tied to anything outside of my own personal experience," she took it to Instagram to her 6 million fans. "It was written in response to people who often used that term to hurt me. I made an attempt to flip its meaning, but recognize that it was a bad decision to use the term in my music."
Aside from Doja Cat, we're exploring some of the musicians who had been accused of racism in the past.
12 Rich Brian
Vine sensation and Indonesian rapper Rich Brian, whose real name Brian Imanuel Soewarno, used 'Rich Chigga' as his moniker when he released his DJ Smokey-produced first-ever song, Living the Dream, back in 2015. His first ever international-charting song, Dat $tick, went viral in 2016, and it wasn't safe from controversies.
"At the time, my whole intention was like, "If I have a song that blows up, and I'm this kid, and I say the N-Word, would people be like 'Holy shit, that song is so cool when he said that N-word. I think I'll let it slide," Brian told Genius. "I was basically just trying to make people less sensitive to the word and take the power out of the word, but then I realized I'm totally not in a position to do that."
As a result, he's transformed into what we know today as Rich Brian from January 2018 onwards. He took to Twitter, "I have been planning to do this forever, and I'm so happy to finally do it. I was naive, and I made a mistake."
11 Eminem
Coming up as a vanilla rapper from Detroit battle-rap scene, Eminem always stirred controversy even before being discovered by Dre. When the Stan rapper got himself caught up in a beef against The Source magazine, its owner, Ray Benzino, threw barbs at him and call Eminem 'the Hitler of Rap' and a '2003 Vanilla Ice.'
As the feud escalated, The Source dug up two unreleased tapes of young Marshall using racial slurs, titled Foolish Pride and So Many Styles. He addressed the issue on Yellow Brick Road form 2004 Encore album in the Shady-est possible, "I singled out a whole race / And for that I apologize, I was wrong / 'Cause no matter what color a girl is, she's still a whore."
10 Drake
Drake and Pusha-T exchanged a few not-so-nice comments about each other the whole of 2018, but it's a shared secret that Pusha-T came home with the winning belt with his lethal diss track, The Story of Adidon. Drake, who came from a mixed family of an African American father and a Caucasian Jewish mother, was in hot water for the diss track cover art, which featured himself in blackface.
"This picture is from 2007, a time in my life where I was an actor, and I was working on a project that was about young black actors struggling to get roles, being stereotyped and typecast," Drake took no time to address the issue on his Twitter. "The photos represented how African Americans were once wrongfully portrayed in entertainment."
9 Bruno Mars
More news from 2018. A clip of writer and activist Seren Sensei talking to The Grapevine Show and accusing Bruno Mars, who's a half Filipino and half-Puerto Rican Jewish, of cultural appropriation went viral.
"What Bruno Mars does, is he takes pre-existing work and he just completely, word-for-word recreates it, extrapolates it," she added. "He does not create it, he does not improve upon it, he does not make it better. He's a karaoke singer, he's a wedding singer, he's the person you hire to do Michael Jackson and Prince covers. Yet Bruno Mars has an Album of the Year Grammy and Prince never won an Album of the Year Grammy."
Ironically, Grammy-winning R&B singer Charlie Wilson, one of the black artists Mars is accused of copying, came to Bruno Mars' defense.
"Bruno mars is a genuine talent pure and simple. In fact, he is one of the best we have had the privilege to enjoy in years and is already destined to be one of the greats," he took to Twitter. "Bruno with this (24k Magic) album helped bring back that classic New Jack / R&B sound to the masses when it was left for dead years ago."
8 Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley is one of a kind, but coming up as a white singer in predominantly black genres of gospel, soul, and R&B, his road to success is not always easy and not always hard. A false rumor of the Mississippi-bred singer saying, "The only thing Negroes can do for me is shining my shoes and buying my records" back in 1957, either in Boston or on a CBS news show.
Elvis debunked the rumor as he told black-oriented magazine Jet on the set of his commercially successful single Jailhouse Rock in 1957, "I never said anything like that. And people who know me know I wouldn't have said it."
7 Camila Cabello
Former Fifth Harmony crooner Camila Cabello was thrown under the bus for old racist Tumblr posts attacking the black community and her former bandmate Normani that surfaced online in December 2019, just after releasing her sophomore album Romance.
"When I was younger, I used language that I'm deeply ashamed of and will regret forever," she took to Twitter to apologize. "I was uneducated and ignorant and once I became aware of the history and the weight and the true meaning behind this horrible and hurtful language, I was deeply embarrassed I ever used it. I apologized then and I apologize again now."
6 Bob Dylan
In 2013, legendary singer Bob Dylan, whose real name is Robert Allen Zimmerman, was sued by a French-based Croatian community, the Council of Croats in France, for his alleged racist remark on a Rolling Stone interview a year back against the Croats.
"If you got a slave master or Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that," The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan singer was quoted as saying after addressing that racism is holding America back on the interview. "That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood."
The group didn't take the words kindly and feel like the singer is 'equating Croatian war criminals with all Croats. According to The Guardian, several Croatian radio stations removed Dylan's songs from their playlists following the interview.
5 Lil Pump
Gucci Gang rapper Lil Pump faced a backlash from the Asian community for his derogatory lines about the community and former NBA's Houston Rockets player, Yao Ming, on Butterfly Doors, in 2018. He rapped, "Smokin' on dope (damn) / They call me Yao Ming cause my eye real low (ching chong)."
The Yao Ming line might be entirely omitted from the accompanying music video, but the damage is done.
"I seen the whole thing going on on the internet and all that," Lil Pump issued an apology on Instagram. "I came here to tell you from my part that I'm sorry and I apologize for posting that. It was not my intention to hurt nobody or do none of that, deadass. I got Asian homies, you know. I fuck with everybody and I got nothing against nobody. It's all love."
4 21 Savage
British-born rapper 21 Savage sparked a controversy for his line "We been gettin' that Jewish money, everything is Kosher (On God)" on ASMR from his sophomore, J. Cole-produced album, I Am > I Was.
"The Jewish people I know are very wise with there money," 21 Savage posted to Twitter. "So that's why I said we been gettin Jewish money I never thought anyone would take offense I'm sorry if I offended everybody never my intention I love all people."
3 Justin Timberlake
In 2016, African American actor Jesse Williams from Grey's Anatomy took the BET Awards stage to address racism and cultural appropriation. The powerful speech gained praises from every corner, and that included the former NSYNC frontman Justin Timberlake as he took it to Twitter, "@iJesseWilliams tho...#Inspired #BET2016."
However, some users still took offense to the tweet and accuse JT of cultural appropriation. He didn't take it kindly and responded in a now-deleted tweet, "Oh, you sweet soul. The more you realize that we are the same, the more we can have a conversation. Bye."
After reading some reactions to it, JT tried to clarify the point he was trying to make and apologized if he had unintentionally offended anyone.
"I was truly inspired by @iJesseWilliams speech because I really do feel that we are all one... A human race," he tweeted.
"I feel misunderstood. I responded to a specific tweet that wasn't meant to be a general response," he added. "I shouldn't have responded anyway."
2 Justin Bieber
In 2014, a dusty video of a 14-year-old Justin Bieber singing to One Less Lonely Girl and changing its lyrics to 'one less lonely n*gger' while giggling and joking about killing black people & joining the KKK surfaced online.
"I'm very sorry. I take my friendships with people of all cultures very seriously, and I apologize for offending or hurting anyone with my childish and inexcusable mistake," he wrote in an official statement to The Hollywood Reporter. "I thought long and hard about what I wanted to say, but telling the truth is always what's right."
"Five years ago, I made a reckless and immature mistake, and I'm grateful to those close to me who helped me learn those lessons as a young man," he added. "Once again … I'm sorry."
1 Yelawolf
While their friend Eminem was sitting on the couch, drinking his diet coke, and chilling after releasing Music to be Murdered By in the early 2020s, Royce da 5' 9" and Yelawolf had been at it. Royce dissed Yela on Westside Gunn-featured track Overcomer from The Allegory album in 2020, "Yelawolf this is your first and your last pass / I ain't gon' put it on blast, your punk ass know what this about."
While Royce hasn't addressed the exact reason that triggered the diss, DJ Vlad of VladTV told the reasoning behind it in an interview with Lord Jamar.
"Apparently, Royce sent one of his proteges to work with Yelawolf, I guess out in Alabama. Yelawolf had a white DJ, and the kid who went out there was black. And Yelawolf had a white DJ, and he started using the n-word around this guy," the hip-hop YouTuber said. "When the guy went and complained to Yelawolf, Yelawolf said you just need to take it. And, if you want to work with us, you're gonna need to basically tolerate us using the n-word with the hard r."
"And during the conversation, Yelawolf was using the n-word with the hard r. And when the information got back to Royce, that triggered the diss," he added.