The song says: 'You know you want it.' Well, you can't know they want it unless they tell you they want it."īy that point, Thicke's hit was part of a bigger debate about the messages of pop lyrics and videos. "This is about ensuring that everyone is fully aware that you need enthusiastic consent before sex. "It promotes a very worrying attitude towards sex and consent," explained Kirsty Haigh, EUSA's vice-president of services. Also in September, Edinburgh University Students' Association (EUSA) became the first student body to ban Blurred Lines.
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. Throughout the summer, as the song eclipsed even Daft Punk's Get Lucky as the biggest hit of 2013, debate about its sexual politics heated up. 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. 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. At the end of March, mid-table R&B singer Thicke, along with producer Pharrell Williams and rapper TI, released Blurred Lines, a libidinous R&B party jam about a woman in a nightclub who may or not be interested in him. It seems impossible that anyone with the faintest interest in popular culture could have missed either the song or the controversy, but here is a recap. This is the latest development in the story of how the biggest song of the year became the most controversial of the decade: an unprecedented achievement, though not one that fills Thicke with pride. It joins around 20 other UK student unions to do so. All Rights Reserved.T his week, University College London student union (UCLU) took the unusual step of banning a single song, Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines. The spokesperson did note that prior to Thicke's unrated clip, music videos hadn't been an area in which the company had needed to test their "Artistic" policies.įor more entertainment news, follow an interview with the Law Revue Girls on the News Hub from WSJ Live:Ĭopyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. (Meaning that any video with an educational, documentary, scientific or artistic message that also featured nudity was considered acceptable to post on YouTube). That video, which has been viewed roughly 6.8 million times, fell under YouTube's EDSA (Education, Documentary, Scientific, Artistic) policy.
The videos have, respectively, garnered 17 million views and 161 million views.Ī YouTube spokesperson said the Google-owned company decided to reinstate the explicit "Blurred Lines" video behind an age-gate after they received Justin Timberlake's " Tunnel Vision," another video featuring nudity. The nudity-free version, posted March 20, remained live. and Pharrell Williams, met a similar fate as the original unrated version, published on March 28, was removed from YouTube on Apr.
"Blurred Lines," which also features T.I.