Years after “Controlla” took over playlists, Beenie Man is still cashing checks from it.
The dancehall veteran says the money from Drake’s sample of his 1995 track “Tear Off Mi Garment” hasn’t stopped coming in, and he’s in no rush to tell anyone how much it adds up to.
The subject came up during a Nov. 7 interview with Manny Norte on Capital XTRA. Norte asked about the phone call Beenie got when Drake’s camp came knocking, then went straight for the obvious follow up: did the song make him rich?
Well, I get the money,” Beenie Man said around the four minute mark. “We still collecting. The song is still playing so it’s still selling.”
Norte tried to pin him down on a figure, but Beenie wasn’t biting. He laughed it off, told the host not to “worry about it,” and added, “Got kids to feed.”
The numbers behind the song explain why the royalties keep flowing. “Controlla” sits on Views, Drake’s fourth studio album, and it peaked at No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 before earning a five times platinum certification from the RIAA.
The version fans know today wasn’t the only one out there. A cut featuring Popcaan’s verses leaked online on March 29, 2016, but that portion was scrapped, and the final release built in the Beenie Man sample instead.
For Beenie, the whole process sounded pretty smooth. He previously told Billboard that Drake’s team reached out to clear the sample, and that Drake later asked him to record an intro for the track.
“For somebody to take a song that I’ve been done for 15 years, to release and put it out, it’s a big deal,” he told the publication. “For him to idolize me like that, it’s a big deal.”
Drake has built a habit of giving Caribbean records more life, to borrow from his own 2017 project title. His latest example is “BBW” from his recent album Maid of Honour, which works in a sample of Soca vocalist Denise Belfon’s 1998 song “Work.
Belfon’s story is a lot messier than Beenie’s, and it shows a different side of what a Drake sample can do. She says the deal finally got her paid on a record she’d been shut out of for decades.
“Because of Drake’s team, the producer of ‘Work’ was forced to say ‘yes,'” Belfon told Billboard, referring to producer Pupa Nas-T. “For 28 years, he had refused to sign off on my receiving my royalties.
With Drake adding my vocals on ‘BBW,’ he agreed that, moving forward, I would receive my appropriate payment.”
Put the two side by side and you get two very different reasons to celebrate a sample. Beenie talks about it as a sign of respect from a younger star who looked up to him, while Belfon frames it as long overdue justice on money she was owed.
Both artists land in the same place, though: still getting paid off songs recorded in the nineties. And as long as “Controlla” keeps getting spins, Beenie Man’s checks will keep showing up, with the exact amount staying between him and his bank.
