How "Lo" did "J" go?
Before her breakdown last summer, Mariah Carey complained that Jennifer Lopez was copying musical ideas from advance tracks of Carey's then-unreleased "Glitter" soundtrack, claiming that Sony Music head Tommy Mottola (Carey's ex-husband) had leaked the recordings to his new diva. Now Carey's story is being corroborated by Murder Inc. label chief Irv Gotti, who produced both Glitter's "If We" and Lopez' popular remix of "I'm Real", two similar-sounding duets pairing the singers with rapper Ja Rule.
In an interview in the current issue of hip-hop magazine XXL, Gotti says, "Ja wrote a song with him and Mariah singing back and forth on the track. I get a call from Tommy Mottola, who I have a great relationship with, and he's like, 'I need you to do me a favor. I want you to do this remix for Jennifer Lopez. I want you to put Ja on the record.' I immediately knew what he was doing because we just finished the Mariah record."
Even Lopez's initial version of "I'm Real," the upbeat, Ja-free mix that appeared on her "J.Lo" album a year ago, was a swipe, Carey had said, taking an obscure sample she had used in her first version of Glitter's "Loverboy". That sample was from an out-of-print 1978 recording of "Firecracker" by Japanese electronica pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra, which was itself a cover of a late 1950s composition by surf/lounge instrumentalist Martin Denny.
On Tuesday, Denny's publisher told FoxNews.com that no one had ever contacted him about sampling the song until Carey requested it for "Loverboy", but three weeks later, Lopez asked to license it as well, and her recording was released first. "When Jennifer Lopez's record came out, and had the exact same song," a Carey associate told FoxNews, "we knew she had a right to be paranoid. We couldn't believe it."
Carey had to make a hasty rerecording of "Loverboy" using a sample of Cameo's "Candy" instead, one of the few tunes that would fit what had already been shot for the film. Sony, which had initially dismissed the two uses of the same arcane, hard-to-find, previously ignored sample as coincidence, denied this week that either version of "I'm Real" was stolen from Carey, with a spokesperson telling FoxNews that the beat-biting accusations were "absolutely untrue". (Sound Bites) Many thanks to Mariah Buzz.
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