Today, Explained - Ed Sheeran and the “Blurred Lines” effect

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

Ed Sheeran just won a big copyright trial. But he might not have even been in court if not for Robin Thicke and Pharrell’s “Blurred Lines.” Pitchfork’s Jayson Greene explains how the song of the summer from 10 years ago simply refuses to go away. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Matt Collette, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ten years ago, in the summer of 2013, Blurred Lines was everywhere. And eventually, it made its way to court for sounding too much like a Marvin Gaye song called Got To Give It Up. The verdict in that court case had huge implications for the music industry, and it's the reason Ed Sheeran was just in court, because this. When your legs don't work like they used to before. Kinda sorta sounded a bit too much like this. I've been really trying baby.

Coming up on today, explain the lasting legacy of a song that just refuses to go away. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey. Oh. Hey, hey, hey. Woo. refuses to go away. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications.

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who's recently written about Blurred Lines and Thinking Out Loud and Where the Two Songs Intersect. We're going to start with Blurred Lines because... Well, because unlike, I would say, 99% of the other number one pop hits from 2013, Blurred Lines has had an infernal afterlife that has extended so far past the moment it was on the charts. It is a singular phenomenon for so many reasons. And what's remarkable is that all of the reasons it has lingered in our cultural imagination are not good ones.

The story of Blurred Lines begins with Robin Thicke, son of the actor Alan, bona fide nepo baby. I mean, he's like a factory preset nepo baby. Absolutely. 100%, dude. Back in 1991, he even wrote a song for his dad's beloved sitcom, Growing Pains. Robin has been into music in a big way for a couple of years. Loves music, especially rap music.

Happy smiling, Robin. But what's funny, too, is to look back, because no one really thought of Robin Thicke this way when he first pops up in the culture. If you were checking out video blocks on countdown shows around then, you would have seen this scruffy looking guy who had at the time, it's crazy to look at now,

he had long hair. He either was or was pretending to be, for the sake of a video, a bike messenger. But he's in a video around that time for this When I Get You Alone song. It samples a fifth of Beethoven and he's riding his bike. He looks like a total like Hesher burnout dude from like a Judd Apatow comedy. Only reason I started selling pot is so I could put my bubby in a nice retirement.

Oh, yeah, she must be proud of you. And the song is kind of like a low key hit, a sleeper for sure, but it establishes him as like a neo soul, blue eyed soul type dude in the sort of second string Justin Timberlake vibe. He's got like a passively soulful voice and his voice is elastic enough. It's got a little bit of grain to it, so he's not completely smooth, but he's pretty smooth. And he works pretty well in a variety of contexts. And what he does is he develops kind of like a following in the rap community.

And so for a while, this dude was kind of an underdog. Music journalists loved him. He was the pop star that they thought should be bigger than he was. And I get you now. Come on. And what happens is that in 2013, he works with Pharrell on what is sort of positioned as hopefully a big breakout. Everybody get up. And kind of a goofy, on the surface at least, video.

It debuts in March of 2013 and doesn't set the world on fire. But people like it. Thank you so much for coming to do this. I just love that. Well, everyone loves this song. It's just great. People were like, yay, this song is great. Finally a fun, good pop song, you know,

and people were really rooting for him for a short time there. And as you might recall, dear listener, people eventually stopped rooting for this song. Well, that's because of the first fateful incident in like the Blurred Lines story, which is that a week after the video debuts, Robin Thicke's team has decided that they're going to release the unrated version of this video. It was directed by this woman, Diane Martell, who filmed a version of this video with all three of

the supermodels, topless. And they put this on YouTube specifically because they know it violates the community standards and they are looking to generate some noise. They want a controversy to attach to this song and it instantly works. Any press is good press. Any press is good press at this point in the story's timeline, right? They use this as fuel. It is banned instantly. You know, Robin Thicke and Pharrell get to go on the then sort of nascent Twitter platform and complain about their too-hot-for-YouTube video being taken down, and they're like, it's still on Vivo, and pointing people towards it.

And this sort of thing has the exact effect they hoped it would. At this point, they are still super in control of this song's narrative. The song shoots up, like, overnight overnight nearly the charts. It's not number one yet, but suddenly it goes from this sort of thing lurking in the bottom half of the charts to a big rising song. What happens essentially is that the song hits number one, and then there's a certain level of success that starts to turn into a curse. Trisha Romano writes a piece for the Daily Beast,

and that is headlined, Blurred Lines, The Song of the Summer is Kind of Rapey. And that is the first time this word, which just sliced right through everyone's minds. You could not read a word like that, especially in boldface type in a headline, and look at that video the same way ever again. It's not just the visuals, Tricia points out.

It's not just the video setup. It's also the song. The song on its own is called Blurred Lines, and the lines that are being blurred are the lines of consent. And what Robin Thicke is singing in his goofy falsetto is, I know you want it. And then paired with the video, really summons some pretty dark ideas about what we think as a culture consent looks like. The majority of the song has the R&B singer murmuring, I know you want it over and over into a girl's ear. Call me a cynic, but that phrase does not exactly encompass the notion of consent and sexual activity.

Seriously, this song is disgusting. And that's where this first link gets established between the song's message and its presentation. It generates the first true controversy and backlash that the people who created the song did not wish for, did not anticipate, and did not know what to do with. Then here is where, like, in like a Greek tragedy or some like, you know, grand operatic sort of climax, we have this other character who comes into this storyline like the angel of death. Miley Cyrus is looking to get rid of her Mouseketeer image.

And so then we have the VMAs, the fateful night of the VMAs when Miley Cyrus jumps out of a teddy bear and grinds on it and sticks her tongue out to the side in what is now this weirdly iconic moment and all she's doing is this you know this dance that's like it's it's long been a part of like bounce music culture in new orleans it is not new but it's new to the largely white audience she was twerking on maine she was twerking on Maine before anyone knew what any of those three words meant, you know. Then Robin Thicke comes out after she finishes her performance and she's just made this really uncomfortable mess. And there's a lot of cutaway shots to pop stars, Rihanna, Drake, looking deeply uncomfortable

during Miley's performance, right? And then here comes Robin Thicke to perform Blurred Lines. And the moment in which they sort of joined in eternity was when she bends over in front of him wearing the foam finger, which is a prop from the Blurred Lines video. And she rubs it on herself on her crotch. She bends over and twerks in front of Robin Thicke.

And everyone again goes completely nuts. I know you want it. You know I want it, baby. You want it? Oh yes I nuts. I know you want it. You know I want it, baby. You want it? Oh, yes, I do. I know you want it. But you're a good girl. Yes, you are.

But the person who really suffers is Robin Thicke. Which is crazy because the performance is much more Miley-oriented. But this is bad news for Robin Thicke. And it's a complicated thing, right? There's been like several weeks of open discussion now about the predatory dynamics of this man standing behind, you know, barely clothed or half-nude women who are half his age. And here he is being grinded on by a woman who is very naked or nearly naked half his age and then this photo surfaces from the after party of that exact night i mean i couldn't make this up again it's like he's not doing like a ron burgundy bit like he is ron burgundy You have an absolutely breathtaking hiney. I mean, that thing is good. You know,

he's about to get hit by this train that he doesn't even understand, right? He has his hand resting on the behind of this blonde woman. This happened at the VMAs after party. And the mass consensus is finally reached. He's done. He's officially toxic. And now this critique becomes nationwide and international. You know, I don't think people got it out here, you know, in those positions of power. I think the kids get it. And I think, you know, unfortunately, the people that don't understand the song are the ones that have the power to ban it. So, you know, I just have to deal with that. And then protesters and survivors of sexual violence and abuse start protesting, and they're holding up placards that are basically referencing the song's lyrics.

It's serious now. It's very serious now. It's dead serious. And it's the kind of thing that once it's turned that corner, you can never look at it again as the song it once was. It is now a toxic song. And then in a sort of perfect postscript to Robin Thicke's Downfall, Miley Cyrus debuts her second single in the immediate aftermath of the VMAs controversy, and it's a song called Wrecking Ball. And guess which song ends up number one? It's an opera about the 2010s, man. I mean, whether you're talking about issues around, you know,

what would become the Me Too revolution, right, about predatory dynamics in the entertainment industry, about unexamined intersections of race and class, it's just a horribly perfect encapsulation of all of these things. Robin Thicke, Pharrell, and Blurred Lines head to court and then Ed Sheeran does too when we're back on Today Explained. came in like a wrecking ball. I never hit so hard in love. All I wanted was you. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to

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how Blurred Lines ended up on trial and how that led to Ed Sheeran and Thinking Out Loud landing in court too. We got to go back to October 2013. This song is no longer number one, right? But it's generated untold millions in revenue. Yeah. An insane amount of money for everyone involved. For Pharrell, who is the song's writer. For Robin Thicke, you know, for every person involved. And everyone acknowledged the similarity this song had from the get-go, right? When people still loved Blurred Lines before it was number one, when it was first reported, I would say that

half of the people who reported on the song erroneously called it a sample of Marvin Gaye's Got to Give It Up. Because the groove of the song on cowbell with electric piano and syncopated bass with a lot of open space is really, really reminiscent of that song in a way that feels at least intentional. And it's compounded by the fact that when they go in to record this composition, Pharrell punches up the background with these sort of soft little yelps and exclamations that are seemingly very intentionally designed to evoke memories of the dinner room chatter that's sort of going on behind got to give it up right it seems like it's really clear as an homage

but it's not a sample right they did not go to the original recording he did not like isolate a piece of the audio and flip it because that would require explicitly going to the marvin gay estate for permission it would require them paying a fee to them. They do something complicated that's not quite sample, not quite interpolation. And this had become very popular, especially as sample fees got astronomically expensive, is that you want to siphon off a song's vibe, you know, and you want to do it in a way

that gives you some plausible legal deniability. And so you recreate a vibe. But the Marvin Gaye estate sues Pharrell and Robin Thicke, not for recreating a vibe, but for copyright infringement. Did Robin Thicke, Pharrell, and T.I. copy elements from Marvin Gaye's hit, Gotta Give It Up, or not? Well, two of Marvin Gaye's kids say yes. I think at this point, everyone involved at least thought, well, this lawsuit's frivolous. This is at least one thing that's going to blow over. Because on paper, the notes on the sheet music of Blurred Lines

don't have the same rhythms as Got to Give It Up Lines don't have the same rhythms as Got to Give It Up. They don't have the same melody as Got to Give It Up or the same chords as Got to Give It Up. They're not played in the same sequence as Got to Give It Up. And they're not even in the same key as Got to Give It Up, right? You lay that out and it sounds like, well, how could anyone truly expect to win a court case? Particularly because when the court case begins, the judge agrees that they're only going to think about copyright as the notes on the page. That's the only thing that they say is being examined.

Unfortunately for Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams, it's got a jury in the room, people with ears who don't necessarily have a musicology degree and don't, haven't spent the last, you know, 20 years of their lives living in a world where they're debating between the master royalty race. They don't know what any of this stuff means.

What they know is that this song sounds a hell of a lot like this other song, and these people are insisting it's not. And Pharrell very memorably says, you can't copyright a feeling. But he loses. Out of that breaking headline late today from Los Angeles, a verdict tonight in the Blurred Lines case. A jury decided in the case in favor of Marvin Gaye's children and awarding them $7.3 million, saying Robin Thicke and Pharrell borrowed from that song.

And people are so freaked out in the music industry about the implications of what this means for their business, for minting and creating new hits, that they get like an amicus brief with hundreds of people signing it, alleging that this would be disastrous for the ecology of the pop music world. And this is how poor Ed Sheeran ends up in court as well. And instead of blurred lines and gotta give it up, it's thinking out loud and let's get it on. It's the same artist.

It's Marvin Gaye's estate again, or the songwriter's estate? Absolutely, incredibly. It's a complete redux, right? I mean, there's a deep irony to the fact that Ed Sheeran, whose music has been criticized relentlessly and dragged through the courts. So he's been hit both legally and by, you know, commentators for how derivative his music is of other people's music. Even his court case is a complete redo of the Blurred Lines court case. It's like he covered Blurred Lines as an actual lawsuit. And it comes down to the same kind of questions

that Blurred Lines came down to, which is sort of like the chord progression is very similar. I'm starting out with thinking out loud, just one bar of it, and then going to one bar of let's get it on, and then alternating between them in the verse. And baby mine Tryin' to hold back this feeling for so long Heart could stupefied us Heart at 23 And if you feel like I feel, baby Easy

And I'm think about how Come on Oh, come on Woo! But how many chord progressions can you really say are unique? And this gets into a really rich and long-tangled legal history of this exact same problem, right? I mean, not only are there a limited number of chord progressions, period, but there's an even smaller number that pop songwriters tend to use because we all recognize

them. And they fit in our brains. They feel familiar. But really, you know, there's a reason why if you hand someone an acoustic guitar and teach them like five open chords, they can play some version of nearly every pop song ever written. And then in this case, they have concert footage that they can submit as evidence in which Ed Sheeran is on stage with his guitar alternating in front of the crowd

between Thinking Out Loud and Let's Get It On. Baby, my heart It's gonna last Harder than 20 days I know Let's get it on Big mistake. He's clearly aware that this song exists in direct conversation, right, with Let's Get It On.

But is he doing something illegal? And that's really what it comes down to but basically he restages the blurred lines lawsuit but he gets to win and he wins the singer-songwriter won a major court victory yesterday after a long legal battle over one of his most popular songs a federal jury decided that sharon did not steal key elements of marvin gaye's 1973 song let's get it on On, to create his Grammy-winning hit, Thinking Out Loud. He comes out sort of saying, I'm really relieved, but I'm incredibly frustrated

that this happened. Lawsuits are not a pleasant experience, and I hope with this ruling, it means in the future baseless claims like this can be avoided. This really does have to end. So it's like a flip side of what Pharrell said when he lost. He came out and said, this is really disheartening. I respect the courts, but this is going to stifle creativity, right?

Ed Sheeran gets to walk out and sort of breathe a sigh of relief and wipe his brow and say, okay, I'm going back to work. Hopefully we can all get back to writing songs rather than having to prove that we can write them. How does Ed win where Robin and Pharrell lost? It looks to me like there's a couple things going on. And one of them is that every jury is obviously very different. And it's very much a luck of the draw, right? You don't know which 12 people you're going to get or what they're bringing to it. Plus, Ed Sheeran came out and

said right before the verdict that he would quit music if he was found guilty. The singer saying his music career may slow down if he's found liable, telling the court, if that happens, I'm done. Adding to have someone come in the jury, or are they thinking that's amazing? more directly derivative than Ed Sheeran's Thinking Out Loud does, comes down to a sort of almost a backhanded compliment to how good Pharrell is in the studio at evoking vibes. Because what he did is, even though the chord progression of Got to Give It Up and Blurred Lines are more dissimilar than Thinking Out Loud is to Let's Get It On, right? They're different. On paper, they're different. But what Pharrell is good at is creating a vibe.

And that's his big quote when he's in court. He says, you can't copyright a vibe, but a vibe is very convincing. And what he did with the background vocals on Blurred Lines, where he inserted these little soft yelps that evoke the dinner conversation, background have got to give it up. I think it spoke to the jury's lizard brain

and made it really hard for them in a way that Ed Sheeran's music, which is perfectly functional, and he's got a great command of pop language, he's got a great command of how to hit the beats of a modern singer-songwriter guitar pop song, he doesn't work magic in the studio, and his music doesn't communicate on that sort of vibey level. And I honestly think that if he'd been slightly more evocative with his production choices, he might have found himself in more hot water than he did. Jason Green is a contributing writer at Pitchfork. You can read his big long piece on blurred lines and a shorter one on the Thinking Out Loud legal drama at Pitchfork.com. The big takeaway? Dude, Blurred Lines is still ruining pop music as we speak. Ten years on, that's an impressive legacy. But Jason has a

workaround for you if you love the vibe. I have a solution. Listen to Word Crimes by Weird Al Yankovic. I don't think I know it. It's a song about grammar. It's a parody of Blurred Lines, and it's a rant about using improper grammar. If you want to hear that cowbell again, but, you know, Weird Al's there for you. Or just listen to Marvin Gaye.

Or just listen to Marvin Gaye. There you go. Our show today was produced by Hadi Mawagdi. It was edited by Amina Alsadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Matthew Collette, and mixed by Paul Robert Mounsey. This is Today Explained.