MINNEAPOLIS — Lizzo's "Truth Hurts" is still number one on Billboard's top 100.
You know the line. You know the song. "Truth Hurts" was a sleeper hit that blew up big for Lizzo.
It is now days away from claiming the title as longest running female rap of all time.
But the most popular lyric, "I just took a DNA test turns out, I'm 100-percent that B----" is at the center of controversy. And Lizzo is suing songwriters who claimed credit for her hit, "Truth Hurts."
So, who really gets credit when you have shared songwriting sessions? Who owns what?
Nancy Sims is a lawyer who serves as a copyright program librarian at the University of Minnesota Libraries. She says it is complicated.
“The best advice about that is that you should talk about it before you write the song,“ Sims said. “There isn't actually any kind of thing in the law about who says who counts as an author or an owner. When people work together on creative things, they get to make up some of their own rules about who is considered what kind of creator.”
On Wednesday, Lizzo made her case on Instagram.
She wrote, “The men who now claim a piece of 'Truth Hurts' did not help me write any part of the song. 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."
But Lizzo is sharing her success with the woman whose tweet from 2017 inspired the most popular lyric. Sims said who gets listed as credit and who gets royalties are different.
“It comes down to agreements to who was in the room at the time,” Sims said. “No agreements …that is when things get sticky. It sounds like what the brothers are saying, they are not contesting the line came from a meme saying it was their idea to use it as a song lyric. They had the idea to use an existing line as part of the lyrics, but that is not the sort of thing the law recognizes as copyright authorship.”
Sometimes the truth hurts.
The hit song is an ode to moving on. In it, she addresses her boy problems.
And, it seems, she still has trouble with the fellas.
This time the drama is with two brothers who want a piece of her success.