House music has been getting sampled by pop's biggest names for three decades, and getting paid for it is a different story entirely. That's the fight now playing out around one of the marquee tracks on Beyoncé's Renaissance.
On August 10, 2026, Hirose Enterprise LLC and Shuji Hirose filed suit in the US District Court for the Central District of California against Beyoncé, Parkwood Entertainment and Columbia Records. The claim, per Resident Advisor: the spoken-word intro that opens "Alien Superstar" lifts Foremost Poets' 1998 house track "Moonraker" without a license the plaintiffs recognize as valid.
Who actually owns Moonraker?
This is where it gets messy, and where it gets specifically a house-scene problem. Parkwood says it licensed the sample legitimately, from Foremost Poets artist John Holiday, in September 2022, six weeks after "Alien Superstar" had already come out on the July 29, 2022 release of Renaissance. Hirose Enterprise says that license was worthless, because Holiday had already sold the recording rights to "Moonraker" to the New York label Soundmen on Wax, back in 1998, for $1,500. The original contract documenting that sale was reportedly lost in a 2005 burglary, which is exactly the kind of paperwork gap that plagues underground house catalogs from the pre-digital era: no centralized rights database, no digital contract backup, ownership resting on whoever still has the physical paper or the memory of the deal.
According to RA's reporting, Holiday himself is said to have acknowledged in August 2023 that Hirose held the rightful copyright, which, if accurate, undercuts the license Parkwood is relying on. We Rave You's reporting adds that Hirose first flagged the dispute to Holiday, Parkwood and Columbia in January 2023, months before Renaissance's Renaissance World Tour was even announced, and says the message went unanswered.
An earlier version of this same lawsuit was thrown out on June 26, 2026, but not on the merits: the filing entity hadn't yet legally existed at the time it sued. This August 10 filing is the corrected version, with Hirose Enterprise LLC properly formed and named as plaintiff alongside Shuji Hirose personally.
Why does a 1998 house record still matter here?
"Moonraker" isn't a footnote for people who know house history: it's a golden-era spoken-word house cut, the kind of track that lived on DJ crates and pirate radio before streaming ever existed, made by artists who were never positioned to negotiate against a major-label legal team. That's the pattern underground dance music keeps running into when pop reaches back for its sound: the original creators rarely had the infrastructure, the lawyers or the leverage to lock down airtight paperwork in 1998, and decades later that gap becomes the very thing a pop juggernaut's business affairs department can exploit, intentionally or not.
Plaintiffs say they notified Parkwood and Columbia of the unlicensed sample in January 2023 and were met with silence.
Parkwood, Columbia and Beyoncé have not issued a public response to the new filing. "Alien Superstar" remains on every streaming platform, and the Renaissance album's commercial run continues untouched while the case proceeds. Hirose Enterprise is seeking an injunction plus unspecified damages; no trial date has been set.
What happens next?
The case now moves through discovery in the Central District of California, where the court will have to sort out competing claims over a paper trail that's nearly three decades old, with one crucial document missing since a 2005 burglary. For house heads, the outcome matters less as courtroom drama than as precedent: it's a test of whether a genre built on samples, edits and uncredited crate-digging can actually force accountability when its DNA turns up, unpaid, inside a record that sells stadiums.
