Right now, Justin Bieber has both the #1 single and the #1 album in America. That album, Justice, has been getting some flack because of the way it uses the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. One song, “MLK Interlude,” has audio of a speech that King gave in Atlanta in 1967. Another song, the opening track “2 Much,” also has a King sample. King himself gets posthumous writing credits on both songs.

King’s daughter Bernice King has tweeted her support of Bieber, but plenty of critics have still found Bieber’s use of King’s voice to be both weird and performative. Our own Chris DeVille: “It comes across like Bieber trying to piggyback on the current civil rights resurgence, shoehorning some profundity and broadened perspective into a decidedly self-focused collection of songs.” Bieber has now talked about it.

Billboard reports that Bieber talked a bit about sampling King on Clubhouse, claiming that he was willing to take “as much hate by putting that on the album”:

Being Canadian,… they didn’t teach us about Black history. It was just not a part of our education system. I think for me, coming from Canada and being uneducated and making insensitive jokes when I was a kid and being insensitive and being honestly just a part of the problem because I just didn’t know better. For me to have this platform to just share this raw moment of Martin Luther King in a time where he knew he was going to die for what he was standing up for.

On Twitter last month, Bieber posted a carefully worded statement about the album’s title: