Boots Explains Animal Collective Credit On Beyoncé’s “6 Inch”

Boots Explains Animal Collective Credit On Beyoncé’s “6 Inch”

Amidst the massive credits list on Beyoncé’s new album LEMONADE are big indie-world names like Ezra Koenig, Father John Misty, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Animal Collective. Some of those credits make immediate sense — Ezra Koenig actually seems to have co-produced “Hold Up” — but some are a little murkier. For example, Animal Collective’s Avey Tare, Panda Bear, and Geologist are all listed as writers on the Weeknd-featuring “6 Inch,” and the credits say that the composition “embodies portions” of “My Girls.” As Boots, one of the song’s producers, explains in an annotation on Genius, that’s just because Beyoncé’s “She too smart to crave material things” line is similar to AnCo’s “I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things.” “The Animal Collective ‘material things’ amalgamation was accidental. Similar to when George Harrison got sued for ‘My Sweet Lord,'” Boots says. “You write it and sing it and think ‘that’s fucking great!!!’ And everyone high fives and you’re all geniuses for fourteen seconds but it turns out it’s great because someone else already fucking wrote it. That song is a jam.”

Similarly, every member of Yeah Yeah Yeahs is credited as a writer on “Hold Up” because the song “contains elements” of “Maps,” i.e. Beyoncé’s “Hold up, they don’t love you like I love you” line is very similar to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song’s “Wait, they don’t love you like I love you.” But the “Hold Up” credits get a little weirder from there — in addition to his production credit, Ezra Koenig is given a songwriting credit. And five years ago, he tweeted the exact slightly different version of the line from “Maps,” which he just replied to today with the next line:

So…has Koenig been working on this song for five years? Or did he just like that line and keep it in his back pocket and pull it out when Beyoncé tapped him to work on the song? Or was he literally only given a writing credit because Beyoncé used his five-year-old tweet in her song? Who knows!

To wrap up this game of “What’s up with LEMONADE’s credits?” here’s Father John Misty on his writing credit, which is also for “Hold Up”:

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