Or the way I think about things. And I was like 'Got it. I get it. He added: "I realised that we live in a chauvinist culture in our country. I hadn't realised that. Didn't realise that some of my songs catered to that. So that blew my mind.
Blurred Lines spent five weeks at number one in the UK charts and Pharrell has previously defended its lyrics. In an interview with Pitchfork in , he said: "When you pull back and look at the entire song, the point is she's a good girl, and even good girls want to do things, and that's where you have the blurred lines. People who are agitated just want to be mad, and I accept their opinion. Pharrell and Robin Thicke have also had other issues over the song Blurred Lines.
Listen to Newsbeat live at and weekdays - or listen back here. Image source, Getty Images. Pharrell collaborated with Robin Thicke on Blurred Lines which was released in Model Emily Ratajkowski rose to stardom after appearing in the Blurred Lines video.
In April, one blogger branded it a "rape song" , and two months later Tricia Romano of the Daily Beast described it as "rapey" , a word that caught fire in other media outlets. The song might have escaped censure if the video, in which the three male performers goof around with scantily clad and, in one version, topless models, had not generated its own separate yet overlapping controversy.
Throughout the summer, as the song eclipsed even Daft Punk's Get Lucky as the biggest hit of , debate about its sexual politics heated up. In September, contributors to Project Unbreakable , a photographic project dedicated to rape survivors, held up placards comparing words spoken by their attackers to lines from the song. The song says: 'You know you want it. 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. I directed the girls to look into the camera.
This is very intentional and they do it most of the time; they are in the power position. I don't think the video is sexist. The lyrics are ridiculous, the guys are silly as fuck. Martel's thoughts have received little attention, but then one flaw in the current debate is an unwillingness to credit female artists with ideas of their own.
When Miley Cyrus appeared naked in the Wrecking Ball video, critics assumed director Terry Richardson was calling the shots, yet in the case of Blurred Lines the blame for the video falls on Thicke.
This is just one of the ways in which the battle lines are themselves blurred. Was O'Connor making a valid feminist critique of misogyny in the music industry, or was she indulging in priggish "slut-shaming"? Even more here's that word again problematic is the intersection of gender and race.
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