Katy Perry is on the receiving end of a lawsuit in which a group of Christian rappers are arguing that she stole their music for her hit song “Dark Horse.”

Katy Perry Sued

Grammy-nominated rapper Flame (Marcus Gray), Chike Ojukwu, Emanuel Lambert and Grammy-winning rapper LeCrae Moore filed a lawsuit against Perry and Capitol Records in St. Louis federal court Tuesday, according to the St. Louis Post Dispatch. The group of musicians claims that Perry’s "Dark Horse" rips off their 2008 song “Joyful Noise.”

In addition to Perry, Juicy J and producers Dr. Luke and Max Martin are named in the suit as well as a number of other associates that the suing party believes “infringed the copyright" of “Joyful Noise.” The suit argues that they “exploited and profited” from the use of their Christian rap song with "Dark Horse."

Not only do the musicians take issue with Perry and company making a profit off of "Dark Horse," but they also cite a problem with the themes of the song. They claim the themes in“Dark Horse” will affect their 2008 track. "[Joyful Noise] is irreparably tarnished by its association with the witchcraft, paganism, black magic and Illuminati imagery evoked by the same music in ‘Dark Horse,’" they write in the lawsuit.

The similarities in the beats of “Dark Horse” and “Joyful Noise” were broken down by Flame’s DJ Cho’zyn Boy, who created a SoundCloud audio to make his point.

“What listeners are hearing is Katy Perry’s ‘Dark Horse’ at 66 beats per minute and they’re hearing Flame’s 'Joyful Noise' at 76 beats per minute,” Cho’zyn Boy told Rapzilla. “When they’re separated, they seem a bit different, but when you bring them to the same tempo and you just change her pitch down one octave, they’re identical … When things are that similar, it’s hard to dispute.”

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