One critic’s view: “It’s not just another terrible song. Its historic badness is an achievement that demands respect. How can one song cram in so many failed decisions per minute?” – Rob Sheffield @ Rolling Stone, “‘Blurred Lines’: The Worst Song of This or Any Other Year”
The public’s view: 1.57 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of 2013
It’s tempting for me to just call Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” a “dumpster fire” and move on to the next entry, but that would understate the magnitude of the disaster. “Blurred Lines” is like if someone filled a dumpster with unsold laserdisc copies of Battlefield Earth, lit it on fire using a spontaneously combusting Samsung Galaxy Note 7, extinguished the blaze with New Coke, and loaded the resulting mess into a Boeing 737 Max that then crashed into the Fyre Festival. Yet it’s really not that bad of a listen. “Blurred Lines” didn’t have an awful reputation until well after it became 2013’s Song of the Summer, but at some point things went seriously wrong. It became the focus of a hundred savage opinion pieces, accusations of misogyny in the lyrics and sexual harassment on the set of the video, and a costly lawsuit whose outcome continues to haunt the entertainment industry. We’ve come a long way since the 1970s, when music critics thought that the Captain & Tennille was the most horrifying and offensive thing that they would ever have to confront in their careers.
Usually I research these posts thoroughly, but I don’t feel like wading through a bunch of old legal documents from the “Blurred Lines” copyright case. Instead I will tell the story from memory, so please forgive me if I get a few of the details wrong. If I recall correctly, Thicke, Pharrell, and T.I. got in trouble for appropriating Fat Albert’s trademarked catchphrase – “Hey hey hey” – as a prominent line in their song. Although Albert had passed away of sleep apnea in 1997, his heirs Mushmouth and Weird Harold proceeded to sue Thicke and his team for the unlicensed use of the rotund young man’s famous words. Intellectual property experts initially believed it to be a weak case, as there was no proof that the “Blurred Lines” songwriters had ever seen an episode of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. But then an old interview surfaced in which Thicke gushingly confessed to being a “Fat Albert mega-fan-boy” who had once formed his own junkyard band as a tribute, and who incorporated educational lessons into his songs just as Albert did in his cartoons. The Fat Albert estate was awarded millions of dollars, much of which was spent on a delicate surgical procedure to remove that bizarre pink sea creature from Dumb Donald’s head.
This verdict set a dangerous precedent that has forced all of us to avoid quoting the catchphrases of our favorite animated characters. You can’t tell your Uber driver “To infinity and beyond!” without risking legal action from Buzz Lightyear. Shouting “Pow!” while watching a school cafeteria fistfight now requires royalties to be paid to DC Comics. And President Biden would love to end his farewell address with “Screw you guys, I’m going home,” but doesn’t want to tangle in court with the South Park kids.
I’ve decided not to write about the misogyny allegations that have been leveled against “Blurred Lines”. I consider myself to be a very modern and politically correct kind of guy, but it’s too easy for even an empathetic person like me to accidentally say the wrong thing when discussing that subject. You know how touchy some of those feminist broads and childless cat ladies can be, right? So out of an abundance of caution I will simply declare that I in no way condone any of the dreadful behavior that may or may not be implied by the lyrics of this song.
Sociopolitical controversy will resurface another time or two as we consider the newest “bad” #1 hits, so I must continue to watch my P’s, Q’s, and R’s. I miss the old days when I was writing about Bobby Vinton.
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