How a 1971 sample inspired one of Kanye West’s best songs and got him in legal trouble
‘Bound 2,’ the final song on Kanye West’s 2013 Yeezus album, was arguably most famous for its video depicting Ye’s ex-wife Kim Kardashian topless on a motorcycle. But it was also a well-received, soul-inflected song that evoked memories of Kanye’s College Dropout days.
The track reached number 12 on the US Billboard Hot 100, while only making it to number 55 on the British charts. Its success was fairly modest, in terms of its sales performance, but it nonetheless gained a lot of attention. It gained so much attention, in fact, that Ye ended up battling a lawsuit over it.
‘Bound 2’ serves as a sort of spiritual sequel to a much older song called ‘Bound,’ which was released in 1971. That was by a soul group called Ponderosa Twins Plus One, who formed in Cleveland, Ohio and only released one album during their few years together as a band in the early ’70s.
The original ‘Bound’ was sampled by Kanye for his Yeezus album closer, but that’s where the trouble began. Ricky Spicer, a member of the group, claimed that Ye had sampled Spicer’s voice on the original track without permission, so he filed a lawsuit.
The fact that ‘Bound’ made its way into Ye’s song at all was the result of some last-minute thinking. As explained to Rolling Stone by Rick Rubin, who served as an executive producer on Yeezus, ‘Bound 2’ began life without the ’70s ‘Bound’ sample forming any part of it.
But the track Ye and his team had made wasn’t right, so they started trying to think of ways to make it better. ‘Bound’ was on their minds at the time, so, as Rubin explained, they apparently thought to themselves, “Hmm, maybe there’s a way to integrate this into the song.”
They added a snippet from ‘Bound’ into the track, and they started stripping it of other elements in order to get the sample to fit. Eventually, after working in this way, they created ‘Bound 2,’ which sits at the end of Yeezus. The sample had been key to the song’s success.
But Spicer wasn’t happy about it being used without permission, so, in late 2013, he sued Kanye and his labels, claiming not to have been compensated for his part on ‘Bound 2.’ By 2015, news broke that Ye had decided to settle for an undisclosed amount.
This episode wasn’t actually the only time that Spicer filed a lawsuit in relation to ‘Bound 2.’ In 2014, he sued Vogue and its publisher Condé Nast, too, after the song was used in a video to promote Ye and Kim’s shoot for the magazine.