pitchfork.com/features/article/robin-thicke-blurred-lines-10-years-later

Honestly, a great article. For all of its bullshit, this is the sort of thing that Pitchfork does best: long-form thought pieces on music culture.

It’s wild to look back at how much the music landscape changed after Blurred Lines. 10 years went by fast. Curious to hear folks’ thoughts if you have time to give it a read - I thought they did a great job covering the Marvin Gaye case and the ways that discourse evolved around songs like this over the past decade.

blurred lines is still a memorable classic-esque pop song despite all the baggage

its just a damn shame Pharrell blocked Pharrell from going #1 with the much superior "Get Lucky" that whole summer

its also a damn shame everyone gets sued now cuz blurred lines had the "vibe" of a marvin gaye song

Life was simpler back then.. so much hope for the future..

Don’t really care about what pitchfork has to say, it was a great song

Yeah that’s one of the main theses of the piece. Honestly, I’d have agreed on it being a fun song if it hadn’t aged so poorly. Hard to separate baggage when it only ever succeeded in a lighthearted context to begin with tbh. I mean I can literally just listen to Got To Give It Up and get the best parts of it, lawsuit aside.

Song quality aside it’s wild that they point out how everyone was citing the Twitter responses at the time to the VMA performance. Real time culture was just beginning and it really has been downhill from there.

2013 vmas was a moment in time. Genius level marketing move for Miley

The through-line from the ramifications of this case to venture capitalists buying up catalogs left and right and modern pop songs being so frequently sample-based/handing out songwriter credits proactively like Olivia Rodrigo is crazy

I never really got why people complained about Blurred Lines and still don't like the average rap song is bout 10x wilder hell Pharrell and TI had wilder songs alone.

the fact good 4 u lost that lawsuit implies paramore invented pop punk

The Blurred Lines backlash felt like the first real fake woke moments for me where whenever you asked people to explain the issue they really couldn't or couldn't explain why THAT song was the straw.

Even after plenty of other problematic songs and artist continued to flourish so it was all just kinda virtue signaling

one of the worst songs in history

Perfect storm moment imo. They actually made a great point in the article about how much worse Robin Thicke’s interviews afterward made the whole thing since it repeatedly removed any sort of irony defense and just made him look like an idiot frat boy. There’s objectively been far worse s*** that succeeded since then, but this was probably the last one I can think of that was both this wild and a pop hit to the point you’d hear it in grocery stores. Everyone knew about it and it just wouldn’t go away.

Ironically one of the only other examples I can think of would be Do What U Want by Lady Gaga and R Kelly, but we saw how that went

sucks that this songs wasn’t allowed to just he fun and that you could get sued for a song having a similar vibe to another

robin groping emily is wild tho nasty ass dude

Yeah this track pops into my head every so often and I do legit think it's a pity it kinda became this inescapable rape culture song. it being a total earworm but also a song where most of the sung lyrics are kinda weird and creepy at best and where the video is obviously a bit voyeuristic out the gate was a bad combo for it's longevity

Random but I used to live with a guy in 2013/14 and in the mornings he would walk around the house occasionally doing the hey hey hey bit from this

It was more so the first or one of the first ever "vibes" cancelling, your on the money that there was a ton of music before, then and after that had far worse content but it was really that Robin Thicke had an overall agreed upon vibe of smarmy and creepy guy that everybody hated and for that "vibe" it made the misogynistic content within the song worse for people. Like, if it was just Pharrell himself that performed the song solo then it probably would've never been as hated, Robin Thicke was just uber-off putting to the general public that it just maximized the issues with the song's content.

I disagree at the time most of the public loved him and his wife plus his father was a beloved figure from the 80s.

It wasn't until after did the switch flip and then he got a divorce and made a sad album did he get branded that way but before that he was super loved especially by black people.

Robin was himself like Pharrell going through a career revival alot of which was based on his personality.

"nuanced sociopolitical critique" haha that's really funny

Typical Conde Nastfork faux-deep party line dreck, with the added humor of talking about perfidious "venture capitalists"

You were like

pitchfork gotta be bored to be bringing up a s*** 10 year old marvin gaye ripoff from an artist that sold like 3 copies of his divorce album globally nigga we know the song is creepy and stinks of s***. anyone who disagrees is probably stuck in their childhood/adolescence still and haven’t evolved since