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Female rapper Kush Tracey only recently released a track, Mawe. To her fans, this was the comeback of the time but according to Xav Gang Empire, a Mombasa based group, this was just but a rework of their exact beat for their song Bwaga with little tweaks here and there.
Felix, the manager to Xav gang, owners of the original beat, claims that Kush’s Management knew that the beat existed and belonged to another artiste already.
However Petrooz who produced both beats, doesn’t find any similarity in the two songs as Bwaga is on the G key and Kush Tracey’s Mawe is on the F key and are different musically.
Petrooz says, “I am the one who made the Bwaga chorus and even used my voice on it, and when we worked on the Mawe song, I told Kush Tracey that using one word for the chorus would make the track catchy.”
On the whole allegations, “Xav gang should not be worried about Bwaga because it was my song and I featured them in it. I am not comfortable when they walk around telling people that I copied their song and stuff like that,” he added.
Producers seem to be giving artists a raw deal these days when they sell the same beat or even a whole song to more than one person and feign amnesia when it all comes out.
This is not the first time that there are allegations of a beat being “stolen” under a producer. Gospel artistes and supposed arch enemies Willy Paul and Bahati have been in a similar sticky situation when Willy was accused of listening to Bahati’s track undercover then reproducing the same song, same beat, same message using the same producer, Teddy B.
The same thing happened with Nameless when Ugandan producer Washington sold one beat to two different artistes then later claimed a mix-up during the handing over. The beat was shared with Burundian artiste Serge Nkurunzinza but they only discovered the similarity when Nameless released Salary.
Micasa Sucasa by Khaligraph and Cashy was a hit song that happens to have a “borrowed” beat hence the reason he cannot perform the song due to legal matters and all. The list is endless as this has been the ongoing cycle and tale of the producers short changing artistes with the same or slightly different beats offered to more than one artiste.
