Donna Summer’s estate and Ozzy Osbourne called out rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, over using uncleared samples of their music on his new album.
On Saturday, Feb. 10, the rap/fashion mogul released his collaboration album with singer and rapper Ty Dolla $ign titled “Vultures I.”
Previewed at the United Center in Chicago on Thursday night and at a live show in Las Vegas following the Super Bowl on Sunday, Ye’s new album faces issues over two songs that sample the late Disco queen Donna Summer and legendary rock band Black Sabbath.
The alleged copyright infringement against Summer is found on the electro-pop track “Good (Don’t Die),” which seemingly samples Summer’s infamous Disco classic “I Feel Love.”
On Ye’s track, a singer can be heard crooning out the lyrics “Oh, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive” in a tune that sounds exactly like how Summer sang the lyrics “Ooh, it’s so good, it’s so good. It’s so good, it’s so good, it’s so good,” on her 1977 track.
On the day he released his new album, a
statement on Summer’s Instagram Story accused the rapper of “copyright infringement” after moving forward with the sample despite being “denied” by the late singer’s estate.“Kanye West… asked permission to use Donna Summer’s song I Feel Love, he was denied… he changed the words, had someone re-sing it or used AI, but it’s I Feel Love… copyright infringement!!!” the statement captured by Pop Crave read.
Elsewhere, Black Sabbath frontman Osbourne took to social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, on Friday to call out Kanye for moving forward with a sample of the band’s 1970 track “Iron Man” despite being “refused permission because he is an antisemite.”
“We get so many requests for these songs, and when we saw that request, we just said no way,” Sharon Osbourne told Billboard. “We’ve been in touch with his team … And it’s also an issue of having respect for another artist.”
On Saturday, she followed up with a tweet confirming the Osbourne family’s disassociation with Ye in the wake of his cancellation for spewing antisemitic rhetoric.
“The Osbourne family have never wanted any association with Kanye West,” she wrote in the since-deleted tweet. “He is an anti-Semitic fool who spews his rhetoric out into the world, Kanye, you f—ed with the wrong dude this time. Sincerely, Sharon Osbourne.”