Kanye West is facing yet another lawsuit, this time over alleged uncleared samples on his 2021 album, Donda.
According to a report from Billboard, a case was filed in Los Angeles federal court on Wednesday (July 17) accusing Ye of borrowing elements from a song called “MSD PT2” for Donda cuts “Hurricane” and “Moon” – even after he was denied permission.
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This, the lawyers write, was less about not paying a fee and more about the fact that “intellectual property owners have a right to decide how their property is exploited and need to be able to prevent shameless infringers from simply stealing.”
The suit notes that in an act of “blatant brazenness,” Ye even credited the song’s four creators as songwriters.
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The suit was filed not by the artists, however, but by a company called Artist Revenue Advocates (ARA), which owns the copyrights to “MSD PT2.” The four writers went to ARA after they “unsuccessfully attempted to collect their share of the proceeds from these songs” for nearly three years.
Kanye West’s Donda was a star-studded affair, but at one point during the making of the album, he threatened to remove several artists from the project — including JAY-Z.
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Last month, a mini documentary on the making of Donda leaked online, with the five-minute film offering a behind-the-scenes look at Kanye’s unorthodox creative process — which involved turning Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium into a makeshift recording studio — and at times turbulent emotional state.
Featuring never-before-seen footage, the documentary shows Ye reflecting on his late mother, Donda West, while visiting his childhood home in Chicago, tinkering with various songs in the studio, delivering impassioned speeches and prayers to his team, and linking with Pusha T, Playboi Carti, Fivio Foreign, Rick Rubin and Mike Dean, among others.
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One particularly noteworthy scene captures the Chicago rap mogul on a phone call inside a locker room and threatening to take anybody who doesn’t attend his listening party off the album — JAY-Z included.
“Everybody that’s not here, I’m taking their verses off,” he says. “I’m taking JAY-Z verse, I’m taking — if there’s anybody not here on the porch with me, they’re not on this version.”
After hanging up, Kanye looks to the camera and adds with a laugh: “How do you even describe these kind of conversations, bro?”
JAY-Z’s verse on “Jail” was intact when Donda finally hit streaming services in August 2021, marking the Watch the Throne duo’s first collaboration in five years following Drake’s 2016 song “Pop Style.”
