Beyonce’s highly anticipated seventh album, “Renaissance,” was released today to widespread celebration from fans and critics alike. However, not everyone was celebrating as one of the queen’s fellow artists, Kelis, says that she was not made aware that Beyonce would be sampling her song on the album.
“It’s not a collab, it’s theft,” Kelis said to a fan account celebrating her appearance on the project.
Beyonce’s new song, “Energy,” interpolated – which is similar to sampling but does not involve using the actual recording of the original work – from Kelis’ “Milkshake” which was written and produced by Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo of The Neptunes. Due to this, only Williams and Hugo were credited on the album for the use of the song, while Kelis’ name was not.
“The level of disrespect and utter ignorance of all three parties is astounding,” said Kelis, who claims to have heard about her song’s use on the album at the same time as “everyone else.”
Kelis took to her own Instagram account to complain about the slight, uploading two videos that focus around the topic.
“The reality is that my real beef is not only with Beyoncé, because at the end of the day, she sampled a record. She’s copied me before, so have many other artists, it’s fine, I don’t care about that,” Kelis said. The issue is that not only are we female artists, okay? Black female artists in an industry where there’s not that many of us.”
“We’ve met each other, we know each other, we have mutual friends. It’s not hard. She can contact, right?” she went on to say.
Some Beyonce fans and others monitoring the conflict disagreed with Kelis’ assessment, saying that because she had no writing or production credits on the song that Beyoncé had no obligation to reach out.
“I know what I own and what I don’t own. I also know the lies that were told. I also know the things that were stolen. Publishing was stolen, people were swindled out of rights. It happens all the time, especially back then. So, it’s not about me being mad about Beyoncé,” Kelis said in response.
Kelis has previously called out The Neptunes for what she describes as being “blatantly lied to and tricked,” even saying she made no money off of her two albums produced by them, “Kaleidoscope” in 1999 and “Wanderland” in 2001.
“I was told we were going to split the whole thing 33/33/33, which we didn’t do,” she said in a 2020 interview with The Guardian. “I’m like, “Yeah, I signed what I was told, and I was too young and too stupid to double-check it.’”
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