“I was not given credit for my contribution to the lyrics of the “African Queen” Song.” —Blackface
Wherever you stand on the everlasting debate about the Plantashun Boiz, my guest today is still a legend!
And he came to talk about everything and everyone: breaking tables, drinking tea.
Beneath all of it though, Blackface speaks of the hurt, the pain, the rejection, what he sees as betrayal, and the path he has taken to healing.
This episode is another brilliant story to watch.
What actually happened between the Plantashun Boiz?
Blackface says:
“In the plantashun we have archives, that’s one of the songs that was there and if you wanted to render the song, you would have told me that I want to do the song. He would have told me, he doesn’t have to tell Faze because Faze doesn’t know anything about the song. It’s like if you want to sing ‘You and I’ now, you have to talk to me.
There are songs in the plantashun that if you want to do, you have to talk to me. Although, there are songs that are owned more than 50% by somebody. Once the person has 50% you have to talk to the person. Because the rest of the music will be 25% apiece for you guys. You don’t have to total rights, somebody has more rights than you, it’s like music, writers’ share ratio will have to come into play.
“You know, so there are some songs like that and let somebody live you is like one of those songs, so if they wanted to use it, they would have just called me, “Hello, I want to do this song” and I’ll be like wow let’s do. It would have just been okay and there wouldn’t be any kind of “you stole you stole”.
I didn’t say you should have told me, I just said I deserved to be told. You should have told me you wanted to record it and their explanation was ‘they thought they told me’. I didn’t take offence to that and I still said ‘call me’.”
About the song African queen!
“So when I say you guys have not done what you guys should do, they say ‘Blackface write another song’, ‘you no go write another song?’. What do you mean write another song? And I’m like okay! Well, I could always write another song but they will still come back and say write another song.
So I said, what was going to happen is that I will sing the song again. That was the reason why I did my own rendition of African Queen and did a video for it. So, they’re not going to say write another song.
Yes! I had to use that to prove a point and it wasn’t petty. It was me at the time when they wanted to assassinate my character. I did it to make my stand that I have the right to this music. It takes a long time for Nigerians to understand, so you have to do some things in some way for them to understand.
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