This Haunts Me: Katy Perry Ripped Off a Hilariously Bad Christian Rap Song for "Dark Horse"
The Christian rapper who created the beat stolen for Katy Perry's "Dark Horse" is hilariously bad.
You've heard "Dark Horse": Katy Perry's overwhelmingly bland 2013 pop hit about being a horse. Now check out the original Christian rap song she stole its beat from.
Katy Perry's "Dark Horse" is pretty inoffensive as far as lazy pop music goes. While it's hard to imagine anyone purposely listening to the song in 2019, it's not awful enough to make someone veer their car off the road the second it came on the radio. "Dark Horse" is entirely unremarkable. At least it would be, if not for the fact that Katy Perry stole its beat from a truly remarkable song.
In 2019, a jury ruled in favor of Marcus Gray, a Christian rapper who filed a copyright infringement lawsuit fives years ago claiming that Perry and her team stole the core musical riff from his song, "Joyful Noise."
You can listen to Katy Perry's "Dark Horse" here for a quick refresher:
But much more importantly, you should listen to Marcus Gray's "Joyful Noise." Because wow. It's so funny.
Putting the legality of stealing beats aside, "Joyful Noise" is anything but. Grey, rapping under the stage name FLAME, has mastered the art of pronouncing words incorrectly in order to shove them into rhymes that they don't belong in. At one point, he wants to rhyme "reappeared" with "air," so he just pronounces "air" as "ear." Then he corrects the pronunciation to "air" and rhymes it with "heir," which sounds very bad because those words are homophones. After that, FLAME gives up completely, rhyming "chair" with "chair."
Later, some other Christian rapper named Lecrae steps in and does the exact same s**t, except somehow worse. He tries to rhyme "forward" with "Lord," which...why? So he pronounces "forward" like "fard" and then pronounces "Lord" as "lard." They rhyme on the most technical level whereby the noises sound similar, but somehow calling Jesus "lard" seems like something a song supposedly praising Jesus might want to avoid.
Marcus Gray is very lucky that this lawsuit panned out, because his rap skills are not likely to prove lucrative. But hey, G*d works in mysterious ways!