Joey Jewish’s ‘Stolen’ Track Becomes Blessing in Disguise

Last week, Rapzilla spoke to Joey Jewish about working with non-Christians, his new record, and how he’s reacted to a situation where his music has been “stolen.” In part two with the emcee, Joey opens up about seeing God’s plan through a ripped off song.

Joey Jewish and popular indie rapper Phora have similar styles to their music. In fact, Joey was told by numerous third party sources that Phora was a fan of his work.

When the music video for “Beautiful Solitude” was dropped in February, Joey was told that Phora, “Liked it, he liked the video, visual and track and wanted to possibly connect.”

Joey was excited about the opportunity and thought it would be a good chance to collaborate and perhaps even minister to Phora. He felt that Phora’s music was more on the conscious side, and had a message, so there was definitely something there to relate to.

However, what happened next, took Joey through multiple stages of anger, questioning, and then ultimately a sense of forgiveness.

“About a month or month and a half ago, a buddy said, ‘Hey have you heard this new Phora video. You might be pretty upset by it’. So I watched it,” Joey said. “It had the same beat as ‘Beautiful Solitude’, but the most interesting thing was the song was almost identical to what I did – the video, the lighting, and setting were almost identical to what I released.”

Jewish couldn’t be too upset about the beat being used because it was only a lease, but the violation occurred in what he felt was a “rip off” of his song and music video. The cadence and sound of the song were close to what he did, and the style of the music video was eerily similar.

“He has a bigger audience than me. His video after one month got over a million hits, so people started contacting me via social media saying, ‘Hey, I saw that you used the beat of this video first and I was a fan of Phora and when I saw that he jacked your track it gave me a totally different perspective of this guy’,” revealed the rapper.

He continued, “My first thought was to retaliate and say some things, but that was the flesh speaking. I took a chance to sit back and took a chance to analyze this as a believer.”

Joey says that ultimately this turned out to be a blessing because some of Phora’s listeners were now drawn to Joey’s music.

“I had the opportunity to speak to two people on the phone who accepted Christ,” he shared. “So this negativity ended up backfiring and being something positive for the kingdom.”

Joey said that Phora probably caught wind of the Joey Jewish comparisons because Phora almost immediately released two more music videos to try and push that one back.

When asked how he would respond to a face-to-face meeting with the accused, Joey jokingly threw around the idea of a suplex. With all kidding aside, Jewish said an encounter would be handled “gracefully with a respect for Phora’s song.”

“I would appreciate what he did. I appreciate your art,” said the artist. “I would find common ground to collaborate. I think I could interject and use it as a means to share the gospel.”

Joey said his press release for this story would read, “Mainstream Artist Bites off of Joey Jewish: How it Turned into a Redeeming Story.”

What do you think of Joey’s “Beautiful Solitude” and Phora’s “Like Me”? You be the judge, listen below.

Joey Jewish:

Watch Phora here. (WARNING ADULT LANGUAGE AND CONTENT).

Read part one of this interview here.

Justin Sarachik
Justin Sarachik
Justin is the Editor-in-Chief of Rapzilla.com. He has been a journalist for over a decade and has written or edited for Relevant, Christian Post, BREATHEcast, CCM, Broken Records Magazine, & more. He's written over 10,000 articles, done over 1,000 interviews, and is in post-production for documentaries on Danny "D-Boy" Rodriguez & Mario "Machete" Perez. He's the project manager of the upcoming video game Run the Court and of the media brand Crimefaces. Justin likes to work with indie artists to develop their brands & marketing strategies. Catch him interviewing artists on Survival of the Artist Podcast & creating videos on his social media channels.
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