Lizzo has clearly been one of the breakout artists of 2019, thanks to her smash hit “Truth Hurts.” But now there’s controversy surrounding the song, which the singer has recently addressed.
Earlier this month, producer Justin Raisen issued a statement and said he helped Lizzo write a song called “Healthy” two years ago, and she used one of the lines in that cut for “Truth Hurts.” And she never gave him or the others who worked on “Healthy” credit.
“On April 11th, 2017, we wrote a song called ‘Healthy’ w/ Lizzo, Jesse St John, and Yves Rothman at our studio,” wrote Raisen on Instagram. “‘I just took a DNA test turns out I’m 100% that bitch’ was taken from ‘Healthy’ and used in ‘Truth Hurts.’”
“We were never contacted about being credited for the use of the parts of ‘Healthy’ (melody, lyrics, and chords) that appear in ‘Truth Hurts,'” he added.
Raisen then said he’s been contacting Lizzo’s team and her producer Ricky Reed about getting credit for his work since 2017 and asked for 5 percent of the royalties, which fell on deaf ears.
Lizzo responded to all of this on Wednesday and denied that Raisen helped her write “Truth Hurts.” And she said he had nothing to do with the “100% that bitch” line being created.
“The men who now claim a piece of ‘Truth Hurts’ did not help me write any part of the song,” wrote Lizzo on Instagram “They had nothing to do with the line or how I chose to sing it. There was no one in the room when I wrote ‘Truth Hurts’, except me, Ricky Reed and my tears. That song is my life, and its words are my truth.”
But the Minneapolis native admitted that she actually didn’t come up with the “100% that bitch” lyric, she saw it in a meme two years ago and put it in her song.
“As I’ve shared before, in 2017 while working on a demo I saw a meme that resonated with me, a meme that made me fell like 100% that bitch,” she wrote. “I sang that line in the demo and I later used the line in ‘Truth Hurts’ … I later learned that a tweet inspired the meme. The creator of the tweet is the person I am sharing my success with. Not these men, period.”
A woman who says she’s from North London is the creator of the DNA line, and she acknowledged receiving credit.
“I just took a DNA Test, turns out I’m a credited writer for the number one song on Billboard,” she wrote on Tuesday.
But here’s where the story gets even more convoluted. Because although Lizzo now admits to borrowing the DNA lyric, she denied it in a 2018 tweet.
Lizzo has also since deleted that denial and hasn’t explained why she has two different versions of how she came up with the DNA line. Nor has the singer explained why she deleted the tweet.
“I’ve never seen this before in my life. That’s crazy,” wrote Lizzo last year about the Londoner’s tweet. “There’s 10 billion ppl on the planet. The odds of multiple people having the same idea are very high.”
