Christopher de Cinque, frontman of acclaimed Melbourne band Closure In Moscow, has taken to social media to issue an apology for what he labelled “a regrettable fuck up”, after he used a racial slur in a tweet sent from the band’s official Twitter account during a back-and-forth with rapper Azealia Banks.

As Tone Deaf reported yesterday, Banks has been embroiled in a dispute with fellow rapper Lupe Fiasco and has issued criticisms of several other hip-hop figures, including Kendrick Lamar and Australian Iggy Azalea. Banks started attacking Fiasco via Twitter after the rapper defended Fancy hit-maker Azalea.

After Banks claimed that Fiasco is no longer relevant and unable to book shows, he responded with a photo of a T-shirt from his latest Australian tour. Banks quickly hit back, writing, “In Australia, those are white people… it’s cultural fetishism… they only like you because you’re black… not because you’re good.”

[include_post id=”431871″]

Earlier that day, Banks had her crosshairs focused on Lamar, after he made several comments regarding recent cases of police brutality in the United States during an interview with Billboard. “‘When we don’t respect ourselves how can we expect them to respect us’ dumbest shit I’ve ever heard a black man say,” Banks tweeted.

Her comments soon drew the ire of de Cinque, who tagged Banks in a dispatch that read, “Calls out Kendrick on dumb shit then writes off Australia as a place of nothing but white cultural fetishists… DUMB CUNT.” Banks responded by drawing de Cinque’s attention to Australia’s historical mistreatment of its Aboriginal population.

According to Rip It Up, de Cinque fired back with an incendiary tweet that read, “*Musician use expert opinion to make broad stroke statements about complex social issues* Brb, gotta marginalize another abo.” The tweet quickly drew criticism from many for de Cinque’s use of a slur used to describe Aboriginal people, including from rappers Urthboy and Briggs.

The frontman quickly went into damage control. “I’m terribly sorry for using a term that is racially offensive to our Indigenous people, that is not something we want to perpetuate,” he wrote. “That is a horrible character limit induced, full stop abbreviation fail on our part.”

“Our sincerest apologies to anyone offended. We pulled a dumb cunt move, please don’t let that detract from the danger of generslizing dumb cunts,” de Cinque continued, post-scripting the apology with the hashtag, #140charactersocialcritiquesworkgood.

[include_post id=”422662″]

However, despite initially claiming that the “dumb cunt move” was due to the 140-character limit on Twitter, a recently released long-form apology sheds a different light on the offending tweet, with de Cinque explaining that the tweets stemmed from frustration over Banks oversimplifying important issues simply to have “a dig at Lupe Fiasco”.

“I tried to call someone out for these things through the very same means I was calling out and I failed miserably,” he explained. “That frustration shouldn’t have been expressed in the form of a bite-sized, satirical jab that was not only insensitive but could also be easily misconstrued as bigotry.”

“I’d like to think that people who are familiar with this band see that our credo is to elevate human consciousness by trying to provoke thought and subversively challenging dogmas and prejudices,” he continued, “so I feel pretty ashamed knowing that our first exposure to some people indicated the contrary because I didn’t take a second to think that what came out was something horrible.”