Last weekend I was at a wedding. It was one of those fabulous extended family affairs, with loads of children roaming free and the adults all having a good chinwag. We all hit the dancefloor, the kids taught us some dances, we taught them Whigfield and YMCA (ironically of course). The the DJ played Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines…..
We left the dancefloor shaking our heads in disgust. Because as much as writers Robin Thicke, Pharrell Williams and the woman who directed the dance video try to explain away, this song has lyrics suggesting unwanted sexual encounters may not be unwanted, it’s a blurred line. Which of course we know it isn’t. Let’s me clear NO means NO. Doesn’t matter how much you’ve drunk, taken or how high the heat dial is turned up on the passion - if a person involved in an amourous encounter (man or woman) says stop, no, don’t or even uses body language to that effect, it means STOP, it means NO.
I asked the DJ at the wedding if he knew what the song was about? He said yes. So if he knew why did he play it? Because people request it without knowing, shaking his head in disagreement. But surely you tell them and say you’d rather not play it if that’s alright. He shrugged, turned his back to me to fiddle with his mixing decks. The conversation was over. Mainly because I had criticised him for the way he did his job. But I don’t regret that.
Because that DJ was born from a woman, he may have a sister, a wife, a niece. And what he and lots of others like him, men and women alike, don’t think about how that song makes some young girls feel. You have to consider the peer pressure around sex with teenagers and if a chart-topping song is hinting that you can take control of a sexual encounter if *you* think it’s alright then this is a dangerous precedent for that generation.
What sickens me even more, is there are record executives somewhere, who sat in the room before releasing this track and most likely talked about the implications. I cannot believe in a business context they did not weigh up the risk of bad publicity (which despite the song being banned in several US and UK higher education institutions doesn’t seem to have damaged it too much) and then not one person weighed in on the ethics. Maybe I expect too much.
This sketch from the Reunion Special of BBC’s Goodness Gracious Me sums it up perfectly. Let’s get this video going viral and spread an alternative message to the horrible ‘Blurred Lines’ of Robin Thicke and the team of ethics-free profiteers.
