Son of Spergy by Daniel Caesar

*Read for free on my Substack!

Much to the detest of certain corners of the internet, ones that I don’t bother to check in with anymore, Daniel Caesar is still making incredible music. They might’ve had a point, and I might catch hell for this, but I just don’t care about what artists say drunkenly on Instagram live, and even less about old tweets that they probably should’ve been deleted. We’ve become obsessed with this idea of our internet image acting as moral waystones. This puts celebrities in a funny position because they are infinitely more accessible than anyone in the history of the world up to this point, yet they are as morally ambiguous and prone to mistake as much, if not more, than anyone else.

That’s what makes the rollout for Son of Spergy so interesting. It seems to abandon the philosophy of his albums thus far: to experience, to live, is a curse designed to breed disappointment in anticipation of the heat death of the universe even though sometimes love makes it all alright. A lot of this philosophy feels, ironically, borne from being inscribed into the era of the internet. Instead, this rollout seeks an appreciative minimalism, relying on the internet only as a means of a messenger. Daniel Caesar has dropped his location on…