GloRilla lawsuit

Photo Credit: Markus Winkler

GloRilla and Universal Music have moved to dismiss a “Never Find” infringement suit, arguing, among several other things, that the phrase at the action’s center cannot be copyrighted.

The way the plaintiff (one Natalie Henderson, aka Slimdabodylast) tells the story, she popularized that phrase, “all naturale, no BBL,” on social media back in early 2024. For the uninitiated, the acronym stands for “Brazilian Butt Lift,” and unsurprisingly, then, the phrase itself accompanied “posts concerning her [Henderson’s] modeling and physique.”

Fast forward to later that same year, when Henderson/Slimdabodylast looked to capitalize on the viral momentum by incorporating the phrase into an aptly titled musical work, “All Natural.”

And according to the plaintiff, GloRilla subsequently lifted (no pun intended) elements of “All Natural” without authorization to create “Never Find,” a bonus track on October 2024’s Glorious.

(The relevant GloRilla effort features K Carbon and actually samples 1997’s “My Love is the Shhh!” by Somethin’ for the People, it’s worth noting.)

“There are unmistakable similarities between the two works. Based upon a side-by-side comparison of the two songs, a layperson could hear similarities in the lyrics, arrangement, melody, core expression, content, and other compositional elements in both songs and conclude that [the] songs are essentially identical,” Henderson wrote in the original complaint.

It probably won’t come as a shock that GloRilla, UMG, and the other defendants are on a completely different page.

Enter the initially mentioned dismissal motion, which covers quite a bit of ground despite its relatively short length.

Keeping the focus on top-level details in the interest of brevity here, the court should toss the suit because the plaintiff failed to “identify how, when, or where” the defendants accessed “All Natural,” per the legal text.

That refers to the song – not the viral social posts, which aren’t copyrighted, the filing drives home. And in any event, the usages of the “disputed phrase between the two songs are not substantially similar,” per GloRilla and her counsel.

“Regarding alleged similarity of lyrics, Plaintiff alleges only that Defendants copied the line ‘Slimdabodylast, all naturale, no BBL, mad hoes go to hell.’ But as any ordinary listener can tell when listening to the two songs side-by-side, that line is not at all substantially similar to the phrase to [sic] ‘Natural, no BBL, but I’m still gon’ give them hell’ appearing once in ‘Never Find,’” the defendants wrote.

Not stopping there, the dismissal push refutes different components of the possible lyrical overlap to boot.

“Likewise, the phrases ‘mad hoes go to hell’ and ‘but I’m still gon’ give them hell’ are not substantially similar,” the detail-oriented motion reads. “The phrase from ‘All Natural’ describes where ‘mad hoes’ go, while, in contrast, the phrase in ‘Never Find’ states that the artist is going to give ‘them’ hell. In the ‘All Natural’ lyric, ‘hell’ is a location, but in the ‘Never Find’ lyric, ‘hell’ is what the artist is going to give ‘them.’”

Finally, the core phrase isn’t copyrightable – it purportedly “lacks the minimal creativity required for copyright protection and instead constitutes a commonplace, stock expression” – and has appeared in all manner of other musical works, per the defendants.

At the time of this writing, the New Orleans-based plaintiff didn’t seem to have publicly addressed the dismissal arguments, which extend also to the jurisdictional side. However, the filing party remains active on social media and hasn’t hesitated to discuss the case in general.