There’s a bit of eye-service in the manner in which African mothers discipline their children. Your mother will give you the meanest spanking inside the house and justify it with – so you won’t go and embarrass me outside. In there is an inherent admission that your sins are much more forgivable when committed in private than they are when done in the open. Ketchup recently sat down with New York station Hot 97 and sinned in the open by performing the chorus of his song “Pam Pam”, a song that sounds so unmistakably similar to Shaggy’s 2000 hit “It Wasn’t Me” it practically rehashes the song’s central theme of infidelity but with a much more accommodating partner.
Ketchup was in New York to collect his award for the best dancehall artiste of the year at the Nigeria Entertainment Awards, so he used the opportunity to sit down with DJ Young Chow, the station’s resident Caribbean music specialist. There are two surprises in this story though, first that an artiste without a full body of work won this award ahead of the likes of Patoranking and Timaya and second, Ketchup is the first local-based Nigerian artiste to snag an interview on the reputable station, that’s right, ahead of Wizkid, Davido, Tiwa and Ayo Jay.
Despite the fact that none of those artistes have had expansive press runs to promote their recent projects, Ketchup should be commended for this. According to the singer, his music is being played in the soca circuits in the city, which gives you a clue as to why he came up on Young Chow’s radar and got the interview. The interview was going very well until the self-styled Afro-dancehall singer was asked to perform some new music and he made the ill-advised decision to deliver one of the more unoriginal songs in his catalogue.
We like the spotlight that Nigerian music is receiving, it’s flattering, but when the spotlight is on you, you have to be careful because everything comes to the light, not just the the good and lovely but also the bad and the ugly. When Kendrick Lamar got sued by Bill Withers earlier in year for using one of his songs without permission, I argued that our industry ought to take note – not for now but for later. There used to be a time when rappers could sample classic records as much as they wanted as long as those samples ended up on mixtapes and other non-commercial projects but times have changed, there’s so much money in hip-hop these days that if a rapper becomes big enough, a case can be built around how they still benefited from that record financially. The Kendrick lawsuit might have been strange to hear before 2015/16 but we’ve seen this pattern enough (Mac Miller and Lord Finesse also comes to mind) to say that this type of lawsuit is here to stay.
Things can change for the local music industry in the same way as well! Multinational publishing companies may not be showing serious interest in what’s going on in here right now but I believe that will change as soon as it is established that there are millions to be made from the sales and streams of records. Let’s also not forget that COSON is continuing to to grow in stature as a collection body and their collaboration with IFPI is growing as well.
Ironically, Shaggy himself was sued for the “It Wasn’t Me” record. According to the Jamaican singer –
The crazy story was, we did an interpolation of War’s “Smile Happy,” and when they looked at us, we were supposed to clear it but because Jam and Lewis had eaten up all the budget, we knew that if we said we had to clear a sample, they would tell us to take it off and didn’t have the money to pay for it.
My producer and I, we lied and said there’s no sample. They didn’t know, it was a fucking B-side record. When it actually blew up and became a massive hit, they sued the fuck out us. We lost a shit load of publishing. But that was the sacrifice we had to make to get the record done, to get it on the record.
That’s what it took for “It Wasn’t Me” to become a reality. Through the years, it’s a song that has undoubtedly been bitten without permission in several countries by several artistes, so let me not single out Ketchup. Luckily for him though, Shaggy and his team don’t have a known history of filing lawsuits against those that sample his catalogue unlawfully. If they did, I couldn’t imagine a case as cut-and-dry as Shaggy vs. Ketchup.
We, in Nigeria and Africa, have long lived in our own lawsuit-free bubble where popular international songs are sampled with zero care in the world but I don’t think it’s hard to see, with all the progress we’ve made, that the bubble will bust in the future. I don’t know who the scapegoat will be when that happens but by performing “Pam Pam” so brazenly and tagging it as “his” record, Ketchup is willfully offering himself for that position.