Ratajkowski and two other women appeared topless in the uncensored version of the video, which featured Thicke, rapper T. The song was a huge commercial success and received two Grammy nominations. But it was also controversial for lyrics like "I know you want it.
The Sunday Times spoke to Martel, who told the British newspaper that she approached Thicke after the alleged incident. The shoot is over!! She said Thicke apologized "as if he knew it was wrong without understanding how it might have felt for Emily.
Copyright credit for "Blurred Lines" also led to a protracted legal fight. In a deposition, Thicke said he lied for a year about his role in writing the biggest hit of his career. Thicke said he was too high on Vicodin and drunk on vodka to contribute anything to the song of the summer, which was co-written by Williams and T. Thicke said in the deposition that he didn't recall making any sober statements during the biggest year of his career. In , the Gaye family won their case. By that point, Thicke's hit was part of a bigger debate about the messages of pop lyrics and videos.
Miley Cyrus's performance at the Video Music Awards in August, during which Thicke popped up like some kind of sex-pest Zelig, ignited another firestorm of indignation on several fronts. How do you stop your kids being exposed to it? This week, a tipping point has been reached. Lily Allen launched the video to her comeback single, Hard Out Here , which takes aim at music industry sexism with specific reference to the Blurred Lines video.
They're tired of messages that depict women as highly sexualised passive sex objects. Getting rid of one song won't solve the problem. It's a culture of racism and sexism that we need to change. The ensuing climate of censorship reached a peak in , when rapper Ice-T's rock band Body Count buckled to huge political pressure and deleted their song Cop Killer. They pointedly replaced it on the album with a new song called Freedom of Speech.
That moral panic was driven by older, more conservative campaigners, but much of the current opposition to pop's excesses stems from young feminists.
If the MTV generation was the first to be exposed to the power of music videos, then the YouTube generation is the first to understand those videos in the context of social media and online discourse.
Cultural consumers have never been more attuned to the messages, both explicit and implicit, embedded in popular artforms. Arguments about racism, misogyny and cultural appropriation that used to thrive primarily in academia are now mainstream. Sometimes these concerns about "problematic" art go to comical extremes — the Tumblr Your Fave Is Problematic leaves you wondering if there is anything out there that isn't problematic — but at least young consumers are asking the right questions, in the spirit of playwright August Wilson's axiom: "All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.
Even the most prominent model in the Blurred Lines video, Emily Ratajkowski, has said: "I'm glad that people are criticising pop lyrics, because I think that's an important thing to do.
Many people who follow pop music closely, however, are surprised that Blurred Lines has become such a lightning rod. Maybe it's an easy target because Robin Thicke is kind of slimy. Right now there's a lot of tension between women and men online so this was a way of women taking a piece of pop culture and saying: 'No, we're against this. Blurred Lines is not about rape in the same way that Cop Killer is about the fantasy of killing cops, so it is a question of interpretation.
If you don't think the song's narrator is willing to have sex without consent, then the song seems at worst sleazy, and the reaction overblown. If, however, you think that the concept of "blurred lines" sends a dangerous message to listeners, then it's explosive.
Thicke himself has been a woeful defender of the song in interviews, recalling Spinal Tap's response to being called sexist: "What's wrong with being sexy?
But it is revealing that TI's verse, which features the inflammatory line: "I'll give you something big enough to tear your ass in two," has been replaced in televised performances with milder verses from rappers such as Iggy Azalea and the Roots' Black Thought. The video is another matter. It was conceived and directed by Diane Martel, who told US website Grantland : "It forces the men to feel playful and not at all like predators.
One year later he signed with Jimmy Iovine and Interscope records. The musician and composer released his critically acclaimed debut album, A Beautiful World, in under the name Thicke. The collection was followed by a succession of five critically acclaimed gold and platinum selling album releases.
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