Beyoncé appears to remove Kelis sample from new album amid controversy over credits

Beyoncé has appeared to remove the interpolation of Kelis’s track “Milkshake” on her new album Renaissance.

The move comes after Kelis claimed she was sampled on the “Break My Soul” singer’s new album without permission.

The US artist’s new album Renaissance, released at midnight on Friday (29 July), includes a song titled “Energy” that sampled Kelis’s 2003 track.

The Neptunes’ Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo are the officially credited writers and producers of the original song and are credited on “Energy”. Kelis was not credited.

So far, the interpolation of Kelis’s track is no longer heard in the fifth song of Beyoncé LP if streamed on Apple Music and Tidal.

However, the song’s lyrics video which was originally uploaded to YouTube, still includes the sample.

A recent Instagram post by an account with the handle kelistrends shared an old photo of Kelis and Beyoncé together, alongside the caption, “@Beyonce’s Renaissance album will include a @kelis sample on the song ‘Energy’,” followed by the mindblown emoji.

Under her verified account, @bountyandfull, the 42-year-old singer and chef commented on the post alleging: “It’s not a collab it’s theft”.

“My mind is blown too because the level of disrespect and utter ignorance of all three parties involved is astounding,” Kelis added in a separate comment.

“I heard about this the same way everyone else did. Nothing is ever as it seems, some of the people in this business have no soul or integrity and they have everyone fooled.”

Shortly after Kelis’s comment gained traction, she took to Instagram to post two follow-up video statements in response to accusations that she was “jealous” of Beyoncé.

“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. She’s done this before, so have many other artists. It’s fine, I don’t care about that,” she 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?”

Kelis has spoken out previously about not being properly compensated for her early work with the Neptunes, whom she began working with when she was 19. “I thought it was a beautiful and pure, creative safe space, but it ended up not being that at all,” she said in an interview with The Guardian in 2020.

In other news, Beyoncé has replaced the ableist slur from her song “Heated”, after she received backlash from fans who found the lyrics “offensive”.