Kelis responds to Beyoncé removing ‘Milkshake’ interpolation sample: ‘I won’

Kelis has acknowledged Beyoncé’s removal of the “Milkshake” interpolation in new song “Energy”.

Beyoncé removed Kelis’ sample from her new album Renaissance earlier this week, after Kelis claimed she was sampled on the “Break My Soul” singer’s new album without permission.

As a result, Kelis’s Instagram has become filled with comments and critique from Beyoncé fans, some of which she has responded to.

Replying to a comment on an unrelated post, Kelis said that she was happy that the sample had been removed.

“You happy Beyoncé took the sample off?? Cry baby,” commented one user. “Yes I am actually. lol nobody cried,” Kelis replied.

“I won, I always win and I’m just getting started,” the singer replied to another comment on a post of her relaxing in the sea.

Beyoncé’s new album Renaissance, which was released on 29 July, includes a song that originally sampled Kelis’s 2003 track.

“I heard about this the same way everyone else did,” Kelis said at the time. “Nothing is ever as it seems, some of the people in this business have no soul or integrity and they have everyone fooled.”

Under her verified account, @bountyandfull, the 42-year-old singer and chef commented on the post alleging: “It’s not a collab it’s theft”.

“My mind is blown too because the level of disrespect and utter ignorance of all three parties involved is astounding,” Kelis added in a separate comment.

Shortly after Kelis’s comment gained traction, she took to Instagram to post two follow-up video statements in response to accusations that she was “jealous” of Beyoncé.

“The reality is that my real beef is not ONLY with Beyoncé because, at the end of the day, she sampled a record, she’s copied me before. She’s done this before, so have many other artists. It’s fine, I don’t care about that,” she said. “The issue is that not only are we female artists, okay, Black female artists in an industry [where] there’s not that many of us. We’ve met each other, we know each other, we have mutual friends. It’s not hard. She can contact, right?”

Kelis has spoken out previously about not being properly compensated for her early work with the Neptunes, whom she began working with when she was 19. “I thought it was a beautiful and pure, creative safe space, but it ended up not being that at all,” she said in an interview with The Guardian in 2020.

In other news, Beyoncé has replaced the ableist slur from her song “Heated”, after she received backlash from fans who found the lyrics “offensive”.