Phife Dawg, of the legendary hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest, recently had a sit down with Rolling Stone and revealed that the group “didn’t get nothing” after the release of their most popular song “Can I Kick It?.”
According to Phife Dawg, due to their heavy sampling of Lou Reed’s “Walk On The Wild Side” which their record label Jive never had cleared, all the royalties to the song went straight to Lou Reed.
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“I don’t think they cleared the sample, and instead of Lou Reed saying, ‘You can’t use it,’ he said, ‘Y’all can use it, but I get all the money from that…to this day, we haven’t seen a dime from that song.”
Lou Reed, of the rock band The Velvet Underground has earned every cent of the royalties from A Tribe Called Quest’s song “Can I Kick It?” since it was released. The group has never held a grudge against the singer, who’s now deceased, but does place the blame on the record label, who could have been more proactive about clearing the sample.
“I’m grateful that [the song] kicked in the door, but to be honest, that was the label’s fault. They didn’t clear the sample,” he says. “And rightfully so. It’s his art; it’s his work. He could have easily said no. There could have easily been no ‘Can I Kick It?’ So you take the good with the bad. And the good is, we didn’t get sued. We just didn’t get nothing from it.”
