Super producer Jermaine Dupri?seems so misunderstood these days. *sigh*
[FLASHBACK: In the Tweets: Jermaine Dupri Responds to Janet Jackson Tell-All Rumors… ]
Dupri caught flack yet again when he offered his take on the Blurred Lines lawsuit and in the process managed to diss Ciara by calling her new single a ‘rip off’ of one of his Usher tracks.
[READ: On Blast: Jermaine Dupri Calls Ciara’s ‘I Bet’ COMPLETE RIP OFF of Usher’s ‘U Got It Bad’]
Jermaine recently sat down with Big Tigger of Atlanta’s V-103 radio station to address the issue, stating:
I wasn’t trying to attack Ciara or anything like that. It ain’t like that… what I was trying to do is make sure the guy who was doing the interview understands how frequently this happens in the music business.
This happens probably EVERYDAY… that somebody’s record sounds like somebody else’s record.
It’s very easy for people to be influenced by music. If you listen to records a lot if you listen to artists a lot… it just happens very frequently.
I didn’t know me saying that was going to turn into this…
Dupri still manages to prove his point when he and Big Tigger compare the two songs back to back.
VIDEO: Jermaine Dupri explains Ciara ‘Rip Off’ Statement
While Jermaine certainly ‘cleaned up’ the rip off statement, he definitely has no qualms about Ciara’s song being a direct reflection of ‘U Got It Bad,’ stating:
You can take Usher off the record… remove Usher from the song, I wrote that song, so I know EXACTLy what’s going on here. I sung the song too by the way, I sung the song… with that made cadence.
The cadence on the record is what I’m mostly talking about. I referenced the record in a way that when I hear someone do it I’m like, ‘you are TRYING to do what I did’.
[WATCH: Ciara ‘I Bet’ – (Future Diss) – (Official Video)]
But to be clear, Jermaine has utilized other artists’ music in his original works as well, stating:
I used to sample… Kris Kross whole first album was samples. Every song on the first album was samples and it was samples on top of samples on top of samples.
Someone was like JD you paid so much money out sampling you need to just play the music over. So I started playing the music over.
What playing the music over does is take you from having to pay the master usage. Cause if you sample the record, you gotta pay the record label and you have to pay the artist as well.
If you replay the record, you only have to pay the artist, so you cut the label out.