Drake is facing a new version of a twice-failed copyright lawsuit that claims a pair of his chart-topping 2018 hits – “In My Feelings” and “Nice For What” – featured an illegal sample of a New Orleans artist’s instrumental beat.
In a complaint filed Wednesday in Louisiana federal court, Samuel Nicholas said the New Orleans “bounce” sound of the two Drake songs was supplied by “directly copying” his 2000 track “Roll Call (Instrumental).” Notably, Nicholas has twice before filed those same accusations, but the earlier cases were dismissed because he failed to actually litigate them.
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Like the previous lawsuits, the new one claims that Nicholas’ copyrighted song was sampled and added to Drake’s songs by producer BlaqNmilD – and that the veteran New Orleans producer has also added the same illegal sample to several other bounce songs he worked on for other artists.
In a statement to Billboard, reps for BlaqNmilD – whose real name is Adam J. Pigott – said there was a far less nefarious explanation than infringement. Rather than copying “Roll Call” into Drake’s songs, the producer’s reps said both Pigott and Nicholas had actually sampled the same, far earlier song by legendary Queens hip hop duo The Showboys – an oft-used 1986 sample that forms part of the “the sonic DNA of bounce music.”
“It is this song, ‘Drag Rap (Triggerman),’ that Adam had indeed sampled for the compositions in question,” said Craig E. Baylis, BlaqNmilD’s manager. “The Showboys will attest that Adam ensured that they were contacted for all proper clearances. Our question is, has the plaintiff done the same?”
Nicholas’ lawyer, Mark Edward Andrews, did not return a request for comment on the lawsuit, including why the cases against Drake have been repeatedly dropped and refiled. Representatives for Drake and Warner Music Group, the parent company of the songs’ publishers, also did not return requests for comment.
Both “In My Feelings” and “Nice For What,” released off Drake’s fifth studio album Scorpion in 2018, were critical and commercial successes, with each spending more than eight weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. Both were released with star-studded videos that featured Olivia Wilde, Issa Rae, Will Smith, DJ Khaled, Rashida Jones, Odell Beckham Jr., Dua Lipa and more.
In his lawsuits, Nicholas claims he has direct evidence that BlaqNmilD used his song, thanks to YouTube videos and a reality TV show in which the producer explained his process. In one clip cited by the lawsuit, the producer gave an interview to the website Genius in which he detailed how he had added a specific “beat” to Drake’s songs that incorporated “different bounce elements.”
“The video interview reproduced an approximately 18 second sound clip of ‘that beat’ while displaying an audio spectrum of it, labeled ‘blaq _bouncebeat.wav’,” the lawsuit said. “When plaintiff Samuel Nicholas III became aware of that YouTube video months later, he recognized ‘that beat’ to be an unauthorized copy of his copyrighted work.”
The lawsuit also named Freddie Ross, Jr., a New Orleans rapper known as Big Freedia who also allegedly worked with BlaqNmilD, as well as several other entities involved with the two Drake songs.
