Kanye West can’t seem to catch a break. Following his recent scandals, Ye is now being sued by a record company that claims he never had their permission to sample the 1987 song “South Bronx” by Boogie Down Productions for his track “Life Of The Party” featuring Andre 3000. The song was included as a bonus track on Ye’s album, “Donda,” which was released in August 2021.
In legal documents obtained by TMZ, not only did Ye fail to clear the sample through Phase One Network, the firm that oversees the B-Boy Records catalog, he included the song on his Stem Player, which is said to have sold around 11,000 units in its first 24 hours on sale. And while Ye is believed to have made around $2.2 million from those sales alone, the company argues that while someone on Kanye’s team had reached out to license the record, the song was never cleared.
Since neither parties were able to come to an agreement over the sample, the lawsuit claims that Kanye and his team went ahead with their initial plans without the company’s consent while heavily promoting the song in the lead-up to the release of his Stem player. As expected, they are looking to have the track removed from Ye’s album while simultaneously requesting to receive a portion of profits.
Meanwhile, earlier this month, per NBC, Kanye reportedly paid a former employee a settlement fee after being accused of using anti-semitic language around them on past occasions, while also having allegedly praised his love for Adolf Hitler.
Amid the father of four’s recent controversies concerning the not-so-nice anti-Jewish remark, the unnamed employee claimed to have seen Kanye perpetuate conspiracy theories about Jewish people over the course of five years.
Ryder Ripps, a conceptual artist of Jewish descent, also came out and said there were several incidents where he heard Kanye praising Adolf Hitler and Nazis during meetings that occurred in 2018. “He had told me a bunch of s**t about, like, how ‘Nazis are good at propaganda,’” he asserted.
Kanye was also said to have said things such as Hitler having “some good qualities” about him, and that “he wasn’t all bad.”