The ‘Blurred Lines’ moral panic, 10 years later
Adrian Nguyen
In 2013, the song “Blurred Lines” spent almost two months on top of the Billboard Hot 100, earning Robin Thicke, Pharrell Williams, and TI their biggest hit. The song is known for its unrated music video, which featured the three men accompanied by topless models, one of whom is Emily Ratajkowski, whose appearance in the video made her one of the world’s most famous supermodels. For Thicke, who had previously been just a moderately successful songwriter for Usher, Christina Aguilera, and Will Smith, with a performing career highlight of being featured on tracks for Lil Wayne, “Blurred Lines” was his breakout. Ratajkowski was the secret ingredient: “Blurred Lines” accumulated 14.8 million listens right after Billboard started counting streams from YouTube toward its calculations for its charts.
By the end of the 2010s, Billboard listed it as one of the defining songs of the decade. But once it became popular, listeners felt that the song was inflicted on them. A month after its release on March 29, 2013, a blog called Feminist in LA labeled it “Robin Thicke’s rape song.” Eventually, many commentators agreed with that harsh reaction. Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield called it “the worst song of this or any other year,” while journalists described the lyrics as sleazy or misogynistic, interpreted as condoning sexual assault, beginning with its hook, “I know you want it.“ Then, at the 2013 VMAs, Thicke made everything worse with a surreal and cringeworthy performance of the song, dancing in a pinstripe suit with a scantily clad Miley Cyrus in front of a skeeved-out crowd of thousands in the theater and millions at home. Suddenly, a hit had become a moral abomination, not just a horrible piece of music.
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The scrutiny intensified. A “Law Revue” from the University of New Zealand released a parody called “Defined Lines,” reversing the gender roles of the original to reflect the feminist critique. Lily Allen released a song called “Hard Out Here” that parodied the music video by focusing on the mistreatment of women in the pop industry. Thicke critics praised them for flipping the tone of the original track. Then came calls for the song to be removed from public premises. Numerous student associations in Britain banned the track from being played in campus events, with one student at the University of North Carolina objecting to the song being played by a DJ, saying, “In a lot of ways, violent or graphic images that allude to sexual violence are triggers.” A high school coach was fired for playing it during a practice recital. One petition earned more than 75,000 signatures to remove the song from YouTube, while Annie Lennox has called for further regulations of music videos. Not since the heydays of Tipper Gore and the Parents Resource Music Center had a song been held accountable for what it would supposedly do to the morals of younger listeners.
The discourse around the supposedly harmful “Blurred Lines” arrived with the mainstreaming of the phrase “rape culture,” which implied sexual assault was being normalized and excused in broader society because of the regressive cultural attitudes surrounding gender and sexuality. It extended to the song’s popularity, perceived as the straw that broke the camel’s back. For anti-rape advocates, anyone dancing, singing, or defending it becomes part of something called a “systemic” problem. (The meaning of this word is that its user went to college and thinks people should not be socially permitted to disagree with her or him.)
One thing that was mostly lost amid how much fun people were having 10 years ago using this bad song to fight over power is that they were causing the song’s meaning to be grossly distorted. Back then, thinking outside the herd, music critic Maura Johnston pointed out how, actually, “this is just a cheesy pickup line song and everyone was like: ‘No, it’s about forcing a woman against her will.’” Yet aside from Johnston, the monolithic class of online criticism assessed pop culture not just as a reflection of society but as its driver.
The “Blurred Lines” cultural controversy set the stage for a decade of small-minded fights over whether popular art should refuse to depict the reality from the perspective of the “male gaze.” It was the beginning of a major cultural change, one with upsides and downsides, one that saw the assumption that it’s normal and healthy to acknowledge male lust as a huge part of the way the world works fall away to be replaced by a sort of progressive Victorianism under which the theory seems to be that if we never depict or acknowledge undesirable sexual behaviors, we can discourage them.
But, even still, the biggest impact of “Blurred Lines” may not be the culture war it created. The song may have an even more important legal history.
After “Blurred Lines” became a hit, the Marvin Gaye estate sued Thicke and Pharrell for allegedly plagiarizing “Got To Give It Up,” in a case with reverberations for all “sampling” musicians. Now, anyone who has cursorily heard “Blurred Lines” would be certain that there’s a direct artistic connection to “Got To Give It Up.” But that doesn’t prove that the piece was stolen from Gaye. Still, the Gayes’ attorney, Richard S. Busch, claimed “Blurred Lines” deserved to lose because the computer technology they were using made the “plagiarism” of melodies and harmonies much easier. “Blurred Lines” lost in a verdict that shocked songwriters because it made it difficult to know when a copyright was violated.
Some of the people involved with the song and its music video have moved on from the song entirely. In a 2018 profile for GQ, Pharrell expressed remorse for making it. Ratajkowski claimed in 2021 that Thicke had groped her during the music video. (He denies it.) Thicke never again scored a hit as hot as “Blurred Lines.” His follow-up, Paula, an album designed to publicly fix his marriage with Paula Patton, became a critical and commercial flop, selling 24,000 copies in the United States.
With some hindsight, some of the “Blurred Lines” fracas seems almost quaint. Because it artistically owed to a superior song by Marvin Gaye, “Blurred Lines” did not stand on its own musically. But the idea that the lyrics were atypical for a song in the history of rock, hip-hop, or R&B about a man trying to seduce a woman never made any sense. Thicke was scapegoated after a brief moment in the limelight by content-hungry and culturally panicked writers and a social media mob. It now remains a regressive piece of art, left with no owner. A decade later, maybe it’s time to admit it’s just a regular old mediocre piece of pop music. Unless we’re still in a moral panic.
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Adrian Nguyen is a culture writer based in Sydney, Australia.