ten years later, blurred lines is still the worst song of all time
This article very nearly did not happen. It didn’t occur to me to do a “Blurred Lines” retrospective for the song’s actual tenth birthday, (in March) or the anniversary of its heyday, (the entire goddamn fucking summer of 2013) because I had momentarily forgotten the thing existed. What bliss! To live even an instant without the work of one Robin Thicke poisoning my only brain. I even saw musings on Thicke’s 2013 VMAs performance with Miley Cyrus, including some from Cyrus herself, and I forgot what song they were performing.
Yet, it was not “Used To Be Young” that reanimated the accursed song’s corpse for me — that honor belongs unfairly to Olivia Rodrigo’s “Bad Idea Right?” “Bad Idea Right?” is in no way sonically or lyrically reminiscent of “Blurred Lines”, (I know this because I like it) but as with many Olivia Rodrigo songs, I began reverse-engineering its composition almost immediately. Not because I wanted to determine how different elements of the song worked together to make it something I enjoyed, something that was more than the sum of its parts. Oh no. Like the horrific wake of vultures we all are when it comes to this poor girl, I needed to know which preexisting songs comprised its DNA. I needed to know this so that I could sound well-versed in music history. And smart. I needed to prove I was smarter than a twenty-year-old pop star.
So here, from my rotten mind to yours, is the official genetic makeup of “Bad Idea Right?”:
“Oh, Pretty Woman” by Roy Orbison
“Venus” by Shocking Blue
“Walkie Talkie Man” by Steriogram
“In Too Deep” by Sum 41
“Drama Queen (That Girl)” by Lindsay Lohan
“We R Who We R” by Ke$ha
There. Aren’t I a genius? Don’t we all feel vindicated for owning a pair of ears? Aren’t we all relieved that unlike Rodrigo, we would never plagiarize this brazenly, if we had music careers?
The thing is, we were primed for this after the fuss made about Rodrigo’s 2021 debut album SOUR. You remember — “Brutal” was “Pump It Up”, and Elvis Costello was fine with it, because “Brutal” is a masterpiece; “Good 4 U” was so “Misery Business” that Hayley Williams and Josh Farro got retroactive writing credits; the same thing happened with “Deja Vu” and “Cruel Summer”, although I personally think the former has way more in common with “No Surprises.” Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff were also justifiably credited all along on “1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back”, which purposely samples the piano part from “New Year’s Day”, although I find this much less insidious than retroactive crediting essentially as a result of peer pressure, paranoia, and mockery. The case of “Good 4 U” is especially disheartening, since the chord progression was cited as a deciding factor, and not three months later, Lil Nas X caught zero flak for using it in “That’s What I Want.” Instead, he was chastised for stealing “Hey Ya.”
I can trace this epidemic of superficial similarity-shaming back to at least 2019, when Portugal. The Man magnanimously declined to sue the Jonas Brothers for their shameless theft of “Feel It Still,” whereas they themselves had taken great care to credit the writers of “Please Mr. Postman” out of an abundance of caution. If I may take this moment to be controversial, they didn’t need to do that. “Feel It Still” differs sufficiently from “Please Mr. Postman” to avoid setting off my plagiarism detector. All these songs are unique enough that artists need not get lawyers involved. Are Portugal. The Man really looking to copyright (pardon me while I consult my list of similar elements) falsetto? Muted guitar? The key of C sharp minor? I’m with Elvis Costello on this one.
But what, you’re wondering, does this have to do with “Blurred Lines” and why it sucks? Aren’t the misogynistic lyrics its real crime? Or the music video, and how Thicke groped one of its stars during filming? The fact that despite pushback from basically every woman alive, the song spent 48 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, and 12 of them at #1? Yes! All of those things suck! They all suck, and they’ve been written about extensively. They were written about extensively during the height of the song’s popularity, by people much braver than I was then, and am now. The lawsuit, though, is the facet of the song’s badness wreaking the greatest amount of havoc in 2023. As far as I can observe. Like, misogyny and sexual assault are obviously still problems, but it’s been a while since they were perpetuated specifically by “Blurred Lines.” Remember, I briefly forgot the song even existed.
So, the lawsuit. For those of you fortunate enough not to recall, Thicke, along with cowriters Pharrell Williams and T.I., who feature on the song, was sued for copyright infringement by the estate of the late Marvin Gaye. Purportedly, the “Blurred Lines” gang lifted Gaye’s song “Got to Give It Up” (as well as Funkadelic’s “Sexy Ways”, but I don’t hear that one at all) and Gaye’s family felt he deserved a writing credit. In 2015, the case went to court, and the jury sided against Thicke and co. At the time, I was ecstatic. Finally, I had legal proof that the song that had tormented me throughout the worst summer of my life was bad. Karma had come for Robin Thicke, albeit in a roundabout way, and now he was eternally indebted to a better artist. HELL yeah!
I have not studied law in any capacity; all I have at my disposal is Wikipedia, but I’ll do my best. Basically, Gaye’s estate did the same thing Portugal. The Man did, and alleged that the similarities between “Got to Give It Up” and “Blurred Lines” mandated legal action, except they actually wanted to follow through. Thicke, Williams, and Harris (T.I.’s legal surname) preemptively filed for declaratory relief, which essentially means they wanted a court to rule that they definitely did not steal from Gaye, without any further action taken. This did not work. The only manner in which Thicke and friends were successful was negotiating the parameters of the dispute, so that only the two songs’ respective sheet music was fair game. See, “Got to Give It Up” predates the Copyright Act of 1976, so it was protected under the much more lenient Copyright Act of 1909. The elements of both songs in dispute (i.e. included on the sheet music) are as follows:
Signature phrases
Hooks
Bass lines
Keyboard chords
Harmonic structures
Vocal melodies
I’ll simplify this. The case was essentially determining the extent to which lyrics, melodies, and chord progressions, and how they are used in conjunction with each other, is copyrightable. Notice the descending order of potential for overlap. Theoretically, there can be thousands of chord progressions, yes, but with at least 7,151 spoken languages in the world as of January 2023, I’d argue it’s exponentially more difficult to come up with a totally original chord progression than totally original lyrics. Compounding that are the limitations of western music, which is typically beholden to the twelve-note chromatic scale. In case I haven’t already made this crystal, I think it’s deranged to try copyrighting a chord progression. Are you trying to put The Axis of Awesome out of a job? Or Rob Paravonian?
The jury ruled unanimously against Thicke and co., I suspect at least partially because pretty much the entire world virulently despised Thicke by that point. Thicke et al. appealed the verdict, and were shut down again in 2018, with the Ninth Circuit Court (the one in charge of California, where the suit was filed) ruling that “Got to Give It Up” was “entitled to broad copyright protection because musical compositions are not confined to a narrow range of expression,” and now we’re here. An eighteen-year-old had to spend her entire first album rollout fending off plagiarism accusations from random TikTok users by tacitly endorsing the idea that there can only be one guitar-driven pop punk song sung by a woman about a love triangle with a IV I V vi V chorus, and I break out into hives whenever I see or hear the word interpolate.
As a writer, (at least I think that’s what I’m trying to do here) I’ve been wondering how much someone would have to pull from my own work before I’d consider deeming it plagiarism. Indulge me while I conduct a thought experiment. Music and writing are different endeavors, so I can’t promise exact parallels, but let’s say lyrics are equivalent to specific phrases, syntax, and diction; melodies are hypotheses, talking points, jokes, and the like; chord progressions are subject matter and format. Under no possible circumstance whatsoever would I even entertain the idea of taking legal action against someone else for say, attempting to get the whole Harry Styles thing by consuming his entire creative output up until that point within a very small time frame. Even if this person drew the same conclusions I did, I’d take it in good faith that these were their organic reactions. I’m not saying I’d love this, but they’d have to do something pretty egregious, like copy+paste my exact list of drunken Fine Line opinions for me to actually get angry.
Another song example from 2019, also involving Lil Nas X: He had to retroactively credit Kurt Cobain for “Panini”, because he didn’t realize how much it sounded like “In Bloom.” As in, by his own admission he had never heard “In Bloom” before, and could not have intentionally copied its chorus vocal melody. Should legal exceptions be made in cases like this? I don’t have an answer. What I would love to stop, however, are these nonstop barrages of gotchas directed at fledgling artists. I’m as guilty as anyone of pointing out similarities between new and old songs with sadistic glee, but can we let them live? When I say, for instance, that “The Middle” sounds like “Run Away With Me”, I am not on a moral crusade to bring Zedd and Maren Morris to justice and get Carly Rae Jepsen the royalties she deserves. I’m just being a little shit! And I highly suspect that that’s what most of the people who make those “Where have I heard this before?” shorts about Olivia Rodrigo are doing too. The problem is that some Asshole Douchenozzle Pisslord Fuckerman’s anthem of rape culture made it okay to get lawyers involved and tank someone’s credibility as an artist before their career has even really started. Thanks for that, Robin! And Pharrell, and T.I., whose involvement has been largely forgotten by history, but not by me.
I’m not an authority on this subject. I’m neither a musician nor a copyright lawyer. Do not look to me for answers, just opinions. But I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a song more detrimental to society in as many ways as “Blurred Lines” continues to be. I hated it then, I hate it now, I’ll hate it forever. But ideally, I’ll manage to forget about it until its twentieth anniversary.