Exactly one year ago I finished off my blogging year with a post on gendered atrocities, focusing in particular on the Newtown shooting and the widely discussed gang rape in India. At that point, the hope was that these two events would at least not have been in vain, and that they would stir changes in the right direction. It seems that this did in fact happen in India, where the horridness of rape was given much more attention in the aftermath of the event, which triggered a firestorm of protest. (As for mass shootings and gun control in the US, to my knowledge nothing much seems to have changed since last year…)
And now, looking back on 2013, what strikes me as an absolute lowlight of the year is again something gender-related, at first sight of a much lesser degree of gravity – but only at first sight. One of the biggest hits of the year, Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’, is nothing short of a badly concealed rape apology (read the lyrics for yourself here). That millions and millions of young (and not-so-young) impressionable people should be exposed to the truly disturbing message of the song is very, very worrisome. The catchiness of the song (yes, I’ll admit to its catchiness, which is really the merit of singer, co-writer and producer Pharrell Williams — who, unlike Thicke, is a talented musician) only makes it worse, as it results in millions of kids singing ‘I know you want it’, ‘good girl’, and other horrific bits of the text. (It is particularly surprising that the three singers all seem fairly adjusted, family-oriented people; but what doesn’t one do for success…) The video is equally appalling, featuring three scantily clad female models interacting in unflattering ways with the three fully clad male singers (I’ll just mention hair-pulling and puffing smoke on one of the women’s face – see the video for yourself if you have to. Oh, and there is also an uncensored version!).
What is perhaps most disturbing about the whole thing is that, while the song provoked some heated reactions when it was released in March 2013 (among other things, it was banned at student events in several UK universities), what really set things on fire was Miley Cyrus’ performance of the song with Thicke at the VMA in August, which became the most tweeted-about event in history. So, as long as it was only the three guys and the three less well-known models performing pretty much the same act on the video clip, there wasn’t that much of an uproar; but when young lady Cyrus did the same on TV, the horror! Soon it was all about how out of line she was, but virtually nothing about Thicke’s participation, or even the complicity of the other musicians involved in creating this work of art that is ‘Blurred Lines’.
Some dissenting voices called on the double standards, and at least one blog post I came across discussed explicitly the importance of talking to our sons about Robin Thicke, not only to our daughters about Miley Cyrus. (As the mother of two very young but precocious, avid consumers of pop culture, this is already something I cannot bypass.) But overall, the general reactions have been disappointingly one-sided, and failed to point out that the real issue is with the very existence of songs like ‘Blurred Lines’ in the first place (and I know there is a lot more where this one is coming from…). In conclusion, I can only say that one of my wishes for 2014 is for less sexism and less veiled violence in pop culture – is that too much to ask for? (Never mind, I know the answer…)
UPDATE (January 3rd): As pointed out to me by a number of people, both here in comments and elsewhere, here's an appropriate response to 'Blurred Lines' (parody by Law students at the University of Auckland).
New APPS 
52 responses to “Lowlights of 2013: un-blurring the lines”
Someone raised the interesting point that YouTube video hits now count towards a single’s US chart position. This economic incentive might go some way to explaining the stunningly explicit and women-hating videos (not only the Thicke video, but Cyrus’ own notorious Wrecking Ball video). Make a more sexual video, get more hits, get a higher chart position.
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It is well worth introducing your kids to parodies — they learn to laugh at sexism, and to see an alternative perspective
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y58fr4brPs
and jimmy kimmel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3twwafch4g
Satire’s ancient function of showing the absurdity of what’s popular.
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Tipper Gore was turned into a national joke, but a tiny little circle is going to be drawn around this one thing because feminists say so? Good luck with that. The fight is over, and this is what you get.
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Jackie is right, and I nominate #3 for least intelligible trolling on a philosophy blog in 2013 (it’s a tough contest, I know…)
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Thanks for the post. I just want to suggest that there’s a lot more going on here than the post seems to acknowledge.
First, here was more than a gendered double standard going on with the Thicke/Cyrus MTV performance. Though some mainstream white feminists reacted to Cyrus’s raunchy performance at the VMAs, most of the criticism directed at Cyrus was for the RACISM in her performance. See, for example,
this
or
this
Now, Thicke isn’t innocent of racism (especially w/r/t Blurred Lines; there is a lawsuit from the Marvin Gaye estate, which you can read about here. BUT, whereas the sexism-in-Blurred-Lines conversation had been pretty well played out by the time of the VMAs, Cyrus jumped in with a new shockingly-un-PC schtick, sending social media and the thinkpiece economy aflurry. I don’t think it’s particularly productive to ask whether BL’s sexism or MC’s racism is “worse”. However, in terms of the media cycle, MC’s troll-baiting was fresher than RT’s troll-baiting, so it got more play.
Second, the post’s quick dismissal of Thicke as a musician overlooks the fact that in the world of pop music criticism Thicke is generally recognized as having a strong back catalog of classic (i.e., old-school, unfashionable by current tastes) R&B records. BL was intended to be what would finally break him in to the mainstream charts….which is part of the reason why the video was made to be as shocking as it is. I’m not trying to defend Thicke or BL, but the story of the video and the song is more complicated than the post lets on.
Finally, I want to suggest that pop music in 2013 was also a site of feminist triumph–just think, for example, about Beyonce’s “Beyonce.” This was a huge accomplishment on many levels (innovative music composition, production, cross-media performance, marketing and release, etc.), and it was the basis of some very important conversations in US black feminism. See here
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Folks around here seem to find it pretty easy to throw around accusations like ‘troll’. I would think this sort of thing would be particularly verboten when made within the same breath one confesses to find the ‘troll’ unintelligible. Proposal for the new year: let us endeavor to give our interlocutor a bit more thought before dismissing him or her (or shim, or whatever).
Tipper Gore was worried that technological and sociological changes, particularly in the music that children were listening to in America, would foster licentiousness among young adults. And for all that, Cyrus and whats-his-name are both evidence she was in some respects right (google ‘daggering’ to see what ‘twerking’ is all about). Whether or not this loosening of the bonds of sentiment tends toward a dissolution of the social fabric, and to whatever extent it is a healthy expression of individual and shared character, I think it’s clear that today’s popular art is all geared-up for self-aggrandizement of much the variety that Gore was concerned with.
I’m not supporting her brand of censorship, and to be fair Gore claimed to be increasing the consumer’s knowledge of the marketplace, not directing their preferences. Either way her point, sufficiently circumscribed, seems basically right to me. Seen in this light, bjk can be read as pointing out that talk of ‘rape apology’ rings hollow precisely because Thicke and Cyrus represent a kind of self-expression that humans can and will indulge in when given a license to do so, just as Tipper Gore suspected.
One final thought. To construe the context surrounding Cyrus and Thicke’s performance in terms of rape is to portray the woman in these vignettes as victims subject to the predation of men. Novaes writes that Thicke’s song is “nothing short of a badly concealed rape apology”. I hope that people see there is room for debate about the value of that reading of the performance. I put it to you that today’s American nightlife is, in general, a scene for healthy sexual expression, that contemporary art like that of Cyrus and Thicke fosters and sustains modes for this expression in social practices people like Gore disapprove of, and that women in this culture are, for the most part, rather unlike the victims they are sometimes made out to be. That’s not to downplay the significance of rape, though it is to suggest a shift in emphasis concerning how we understand what’s going on here.
Happy New Year everyone.
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For goodness sake, Stovall, don’t you realize what a cliché your first paragraph is? Crying “oh noes, the civility,” every time there’s a feminist dismissal of a pathetic little anonymous mansplainer like bjk is not exactly original, and the unearned condescending tone isn’t new either. (Seriously, don’t you think bjk got every bit of thought he deserved in #4?) And finally, the false bonhomie of “folks” and “Happy New Year everyone” is both tiresome and grating.
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Thank you for restoring the comment Protevi. The motivations you were giving in defense of your act struck me as publically indefensible, and I’m glad we’ll be able to resume correspondence in this forum.
I’m not sure what the ‘oh noes, the civility’ line is supposed to be doing, but I think, as I’ve tried to make clear, that talk of trolling is a bit much here. This kind of heavy-handedness isn’t gaining you any ground among those who do not already share your view. Perhaps you’re happy with that, secure in the sense that your view is correct. But treating your interlocutor as though his wishing you a happy new year is “tiresome and grating,” while telling him “don’t try my patience with the civility bullshit” (as you’ve done in correspondence) does not speak well of your interest in dialogue. I apologize for being so blunt, truly, but you’ve drawn me to speak this way. If you find my effort to cultivate civility to be bullshit, I can only invite you to reconsider your stance and trust that, in time, the right will be found. Honestly man, I mean the best in this, I’m trying, and I’m not professing to be perfect. I’m just some guy sharing a view and hoping that, together, we’ll be able to work things out.
As I said before, I encourage you to exercise more restraint when coming to settled opinions about what social justice is and calls for in some of these cases. I suspect you’ll find that no small number of well-meaning people will disagree with you about the particulars. (And I don’t see what is supposed to be cliché about my first paragraph–it seems to me pretty obvious that someone who confesses to fail to understand a comment ought not be casting about for a stone like ‘troll’ to throw.)
I’m prepared to let posterity decide whether and to what extent either of us has been sincere in their putative effort to build a community in this matter. I’m game for conversation–let’s try to carry it on like well-meaning adults. That doesn’t mean we have to agree, and certainly there’s room for concerted disagreement. But it might do you well to spend less time worrying about the “pathetic anonymous mansplainers” you imagine yourself to be surrounded by and begin to think a bit more critically about how you yourself are behaving.
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I mean really, my use of ‘folks’ is supposed to be evidence of “false bonhomie”? That’s a pretty messed up view Protevi. You should get that checked out. (winky-face)
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I’m going to leave the exchange between John Protevi and P. Stovall on for now, even though it is clear that comments 7, 8 and 9 are in fact material for personal communication. However, I would very much prefer to have comments in this thread pertain to the topic of the thread (as is the case of #6, even if some of the phrasing in it can be construed as problematic). And I agree that one should be careful with attributions of ‘trollness’; they are effectively silencers of voices that may well be expressing themselves earnestly (prima facie at least).
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Going back to the content of your first comment. I was personally not particularly troubled by the Cyrus performance at the VMA. The lyrics of ‘Blurred lines’ (starting with the title!) seem to me to be much more problematic in that they repeat well-known rapey slogans like ‘I know you want it’ (you’re just pretending not to be interested in sex with me…).
I’m all for a plurality of modes of ‘healthy sexual expression’ (as some of my blog posts will attest, I’m not exactly prude), but as is usually the case, there will be a fine line between what counts as ‘healthy sexual expression’ and practices that can have harmful effects. (For example, some people maintain that pedophilia is a perfectly healthy form of sexual expression, and one that does not harm any of the people involved. I think this is simply false. By contrast, consensual BDSM strikes me as perfectly ‘healthy’.)
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Thanks, Jackie! Unfortunately, my kids are still perhaps too young to get the point of satire (9 and 6, though the 9 yo might get it). However, as I am bound to be confronted with similar situations in many years to come, this is a valuable tip.
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Thanks for the comments. I deliberately left the racial component out of the post, mostly because I feel much less capable of saying something sensible on it than on the gender dimension. However, while it is true that there has been much discussion on the racial-racist dimension of Cyrus’ performance, there’s been at least just as much bashing her for behaving in such a ‘un-ladylike’ way.
Regarding the Marvin Gaye point; shouldn’t we all be listening to ‘Got to give up’, which is sooooo much better than this so-called ‘tribute’ to it, BL?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRcVQDELAd4
And yes, yay for Beyoncé!
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And here’s someone else who really doesn’t like BL: ”Blurred Lines’: The Worst Song of This or Any Other Year’
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/blurred-lines-the-worst-song-of-this-or-any-other-year-20131206
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Thank you Novaes–would you mind saying more about what you think might be problematic in the phrasing of #6?
And I suspect that however fine the line might be, the effort to censure “practices that can have harmful effects” is a lost cause when the modality remains mere possibility, particularly when we’re talking about music and youth culture (vide bjk’s reference to Tipper Gore). Just a few questions: How do you propose to demarcate those aesthetic performances sufficient to warrant condemnation from those practices that afford “healthy sexual expression”? Are you in favor of banning, say, rape scenes in television and movies? Are we to condemn actors who portray rapists with sadistic glee as people who are on the wrong side of your fine line? Only if the rapist doesn’t get a comeuppance in the end? If the actor/rapist isn’t sufficiently punished in the performance, should we condemn the writer or the actor? What about the director and producers? And who exactly gets to draw this “fine line,” or determine how to classify the borderline cases? Indeed, why suppose we can separate artistic performances into those that are healthy and those that have harmful effects once and for all? If we concede that we can’t, what’s left of the program to censure as “rapey” the ones some people disapprove of?
I don’t think Thicke’s song is well-classified when put in terms of “rape apology”. The men and women who breathe this kind of performance are, by and large, playing a different sort of game. And given that it will be near to impossible to apportion any sort of blame for someone who commits a crime under the influence of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”, what ought we do? The fact that some people hear the song as a “rape apology” doesn’t suffice to show that there’s something inherently wrong with the song, or with those who unabashedly enjoy the sentiments it cultivates.
Now I’m myself of the mind that these sentiments are rather base, rooted in our primal natures, and for that reason are not to be given much value (at least, not by themselves). But that’s not to say that the art that fosters them ought to be banned as morally reprehensible or ‘rapey’, even if some people are convinced of its rapeyness.
What am I missing here?
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Sorry, ‘banned’ is too strong in the penultimate sentence of that last post. ‘Censured’ is better.
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You might be able to spin a philosophical discussion out of issues raised by “Blurred Lines”:
“I know you want it” is an intriguing expression – the claim to know another’s desire. Surely sometimes, we’re entitled to make assertions about the perceived mental states of others. If I see you staring at a cake with a look of longing on your face, I might think “You want it, that cake”. Perhaps I express this thought aloud, but you swiftly deny having this want, saying “No I don’t”, because you weren’t concentrating on my presence and answered confusedly; I flustered you. I might repeat myself, strengthening the expression’s initial force by making its status as assertion more explicit: I KNOW you want it, that cake.
A perfectly innocent occurrence I’m sure you’ll agree.
But this kind of case does raises serious issues, because my assertion is also a suggestion. Sometimes, a suggestion might lead one to entertain thoughts or beliefs that one otherwise would not have had. This would call into serious question the warrant that one has in making knowledge claim about the mind of another – how do you know you won’t change the other persons mind? This also raises ethical questions – will the change be for better or worse for you, and/or I, and/or us?
In the innocent case above however, I don’t think these questions are relevant – I don’t believe my assertions could make you desire the cake, because I already know that you want the cake, I can tell by the look on your face. However, hearing the thought might provoke reflection that you wouldn’t otherwise have made, because you weren’t concentrating, and hadn’t fully registered your wanting the cake (why weren’t you eating it already?).
Perhaps this might provoke further thoughts for some of you, I don’t know.
Anyway, given these considerations, it’s possible to see that Blurred Lines might actually be doing good work, encouraging reflection upon attitudes that individuals might otherwise not concentrate upon. Here’s am intuition pump: sometimes in life, girls are wilder than boys, and sometimes this means that boys need to appropriate or use certain techniques of, shall we say, dewildifiction. One of these techniques is mockery, which might include behaving wildly in a non-serious manner, or pretending to be wild. I think this might be what is going on in the video for “Blurred Lines”. There are plenty of cues in the video that point toward this. “#Thicke” is plastered in your face repeatedly, in a red font (because #Stupide would be too obvious). At one point, you can see Pharell Williams singing the line “you da hottest bitch in dis place” to a goat. This serves to nullify any suggestive force the subsequent phrase “you’re an animal” might be otherwise perceived to have. Similar points can be about the smoke blowing etc. in the video. Look carefully at the faces of everyone involved. These people know that they are in safe hands. The director is holding all of the cards.
To be honest, I really don’t see how the video actually makes any visible sense at all. Any “message” a viewer believes that they see is their own projection. Also, there are big dice in the video. Really big dice.
The song’s crime is apparently its being sexy, while also making use of polysemy in order to make light of ambiguities in life. If we cannot have art like this, God rape us all.
Please academics, stop expressing opinions about popular culture, opinions that ought to be motivating direct action against serious issues like actual instances of and incitements toward violence and abuse of women, or men, or whomever. Blurred Lines, although far from perfect, and certainly not “good” (whatever that might mean in this context), is quite possibly doing positive deconstructive work in the lives of the vulgar.
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What, is there some kind of bat-signal at work here?
To be honest, I really don’t see how the video actually makes any visible sense at all. Any “message” a viewer believes that they see is their own projection. Also, there are big dice in the video. Really big dice. The song’s crime is apparently its being sexy, while also making use of polysemy in order to make light of ambiguities in life.
and
Please academics, stop expressing opinions about popular culture, opinions that ought to be motivating direct action against serious issues like actual instances of and incitements toward violence and abuse of women, or men, or whomever
Dozens of repetitions of this comment were submitted, virtually word for word, to the Hendricks threads. Seriously, dudes, these reactions are guaranteed to appear against any feminist cultural analysis; can’t you just come up with a code, like “objections A1, B4, and D3” and save us all some time?
But, sigh, since Stovall is happy to fight to the last drop of my blood, I’ll respond more seriously: I suspect Paul reads everything in terms of theses, that is, propositions set forth with an implied set of necessary and sufficient truth conditions. So to the imagined thesis: “the meaning of Blurred Lines is X,” he looks for counter-examples that would defeat those truth conditions — “hey, isn’t it (logically) possible that Blurred Lines means Y”?
But the whole point of Catarina’s cultural analysis here, it seems to me, is to deal with tendencies for psychological influence of Blurred Lines among a multi-age, multi-gender, multi-racial … population. [The ellipses show that here we need the “embarrassed ‘etc’ ” Butler points us to at the end of Gender Trouble — we can never list all the dimensions of the social multiplicity.]
So offering a counter-example that just has to meet the criterion of mere logical possibility / non-contradiction terribly misses the point. Yes, yawn, we all know about multiple readings of a cultural object; that’s actually the presupposition of Catarina’s analysis, which is sketching the lines of a multiplicity with divergent actualizations of psychological impact of the object’s encounter with different people.
In other words, Catarina is not proposing that there’s a “meaning” of Blurred Lines for everyone, so that Paul’s alternate reading defeats her thesis; rather, the point is that there are differentials of influence for many social dimensions, so that the age, gender, and race of her children are among the dimensions that need discussion.
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Let’s see. We live in a culture in which all too many men are encouraged to believe that whatever they want, women want. (See the epic production of porn.) We live in a culture in which a shocking number of men don’t know how to take “no” for an answer from women–because, well, “I know you want it.” (See statistics on sexual assault and coercion.) Thicke and his producers just strike me as commercially astute idiots. I’m all for free expression, and I feel free to condemn trash as trash. If Thicke and company really wanted to send up the sort of men they portray, there were certainly more obvious ways. One goat isn’t enough. Three cheers for the Auckland students.
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Protevi only hears what he wants.
A self-righteous smuck, that Protevi.
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It’s “schmuck,” you schlemiel. Oy, that I should have kvetchers like this, who can’t even insult me properly!
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You’re sporting quite the persecution complex Protevi; it doesn’t become you. I am hardly out for the last drop of your blood. And you might stop to consider whether these reactions are so common precisely because there’s a failing of contemporary thinking here. After all, those of us who are concerned about violence and its effects might be jarred by Novaes’ willingness to rank Thicke’s song as on a par with the Newtown shooting and a gang rape in India, as she does in the OP. Hope for “less sexism and less veiled violence” sounds just a bit out of place when we’re being asked to rank “Blurred Lines” with gang rape. When you dismiss these rejoinders as tedious, trolling, cliché, or as though they ought to be relegated to some code system like A1 and D3, you come off as tin-eared and part of the problem.
And while I do not claim to speak for Paul or bjk, I don’t think it’s fair to pit this as a debate about how to interpret a song. The question is, instead, what ought we suppose about its cultural significance, the role it’s playing as part of the process that’s educating habits into the people who enjoy it? And on that front, I think we’re much better off talking about what songs like this mean to the people who enjoy them, rather than constructing narratives about rapey-rape culture where women are victims of male aggression and every power differential is sexist. Anytime I’ve seen this song played in a party or a club, the response it gets from the audience is so unlike what’s being portrayed here that it would be laughable were it not so disappointing. And to portray women as passive victims in this context is ridiculous. But then caveat emptor–only a fool would take an academic’s advice as the unvarnished word on what was going on in something like Thicke’s song.
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You’re sporting quite the persecution complex Protevi; it doesn’t become you. I am hardly out for the last drop of your blood.
The allusion, which I see went right over your head, was to the common saying “he’s willing to fight to the last drop of your blood.” It means that you’re willing to make me waste my time.
As for “rapey-rape culture” I’ll just say that I hope everyone googles this page and sees what kind of person you are.
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Again, I don’t claim to speak for Paul or bjk, but I certainly want to leave room for the kind of condemnation of trash as trash that you’re going in for here. I don’t myself subscribe to the inferences that you evince in getting to that condemnation in this context, but I grant you leave to both express yourself in this way and encourage others to do the same. Just because I think young men and women ought to have a right to rub their crotches against each other in dance, it does not follow that I think we ought to regard their doing so as though it has any aesthetic merit or taste. Disgust may remain a proper response even after we recognize that someone has a right to do something we find disgusting. Conversely, it may be that a good bit of twerking would get people to see that it’s really not so rapey after all.
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Bat-signal?! Come on, John. It’s too late for heroes. You guys hounded poor old Captain-Underpants-McGinn out of town, remember? I guess you could call this a bad-babysitting signal. Y’all are blaming ‘bad art’, the “culture industry”, or whatever. The so-called “dudes” see it differently. They blame STUPID HUMANISTS.
Personally, I thought that Hendricks deserved the ridicule and scorn that he received way back when; the conduct of a professor ought to be judged according to different criteria than the conduct of three clownish pop stars. So I don’t see why you’re bringing it up. Some sort of blocking mechanism I suppose.
I’m sorry if my post above was difficult to read charitably, I might come across as more facetious than intended. Also at that time I hadn’t clicked Catarina’s link to THIS:
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/09/17/from-the-mouths-of-rapists-the-lyrics-of-robin-thickes-blurred-lines-and-real-life-rape/
Which is awful. BUT, surely you’d at least agree that the edifying force of this article is parasitic upon the popularity of Blurred Lines. So I stand by the claim that the song is serving a positive deconstructive role, by drawing more attention to potentially harmful expressions. In the absence of cogent examples of how either children or “well adjusted” adults might pick up bad practices from Blurred Lines, it still seems to me that you people are wrong about this one.
Nice luck to you all.
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Please take a step back and look at how this conversation has developed Protevi. In the last 24 hours you’ve deleted two sets of my comments and have just now banned me and then, unbidden, changed your mind. You’ve repeatedly insulted me personally, both privately and on this thread (though now you’ve gone back and cleaned some of it up). As I said above, I don’t think I have it all figured out, but I’m at least giving it a go. Meanwhile, you remain steadfastly resistant to discussion about the particulars. The closest we’ve seen is above at 18, where we find such gnomic gems as the following:
“the whole point of Catarina’s cultural analysis here, it seems to me, is to deal with tendencies for psychological influence of Blurred Lines among a multi-age, multi-gender, multi-racial … population. [The ellipses show that here we need the “embarrassed ‘etc’ ” Butler points us to at the end of Gender Trouble — we can never list all the dimensions of the social multiplicity.]”
Would you have us all simply intuit your sense of what “tendencies for psychological influence” comes to here? If not, you are going to have to say quite a bit more to make this a meaningful criterion. You might begin by looking at the questions I raised for Novaes in 15 above. Either way, I’ll do without your thought-policing, thank you. I’d just as soon go twerk with Miley Cyrus, an act that would itself make me retch a bit. Now if you want to talk about the particulars, I’m happy to take you up on it, and I think I’ve gone some way to give you something to work with. As I’ve said, I think you are misconstruing the social impact of this song, which to my mind is far better represented by the way it is enjoyed as an aesthetic experience by the people who are listening to it than by a rape-culture narrative where women are victims of male sexual aggression (the comparison of the song with gang-rape in India is, quite frankly, a bit obscene).
And personally, I’m quite happy to have people draw conclusions about what kind of a person I am based on what I’ve said here.
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Catarina’s post is great stuff, and the discussion so far very entertaining and informative. That said, I’d like to shift the dialectic a bit. I want to compare Thicke’s Blurred Lines with Zappa’s double-lp Joe’s Garage. (I proudly parenthetically admit that Joe’s Garage is one of my favorite albums.) At the level of formal aesthetic properties, Blurred Lines does not match Zappa’s Joe’s Garage. But with Pharrell at the helm, it’s not surprising that Blurred Lines stands out as a good work, formally; it “certainly” beats anything Gaga does. But suppose that the two works (Lines and Garage) were equally good at the formal level (yes, I know a stretch). Then suppose that Zappa at this time, or even when it came out 30+ years ago, had just as much mainstream appeal (e.g., played at dance clubs). Would Zappa’s Joe’s Garage be considered problematic in a way similar to Blurred Lines? I have to admit that I’m far from “certain” about what the answer would be.
Consider that Zappa (almost certainly) did not endorse the messages of many of his vile characters vocalized in Joe’s Garage. Well, Thicke has also said some things to the extent that he does not endorse the messages of his character vocalized in his Blurred Lines. This does not mean that he’s not lying, or that he’s not deluded, or that originally his work was put out naively. But he at least has this pro tanto defense. (Is is pro tanto or prima facie? Or neither?:))
Additionally, we philosophers (I know I’m speaking for an entire community, shame on me:)) generally work in the direction of answering questions or at least clarifying them. Artists, on the other hand, generally work in the direction of raising questions (yes, we do this too) via creating ambiguity and, quite frankly, some conflict.
That said, I’m disturbed by large groups of teens and college kids performing certain culturally constructed sex (and violent) acts in a dance club, partially moved by the lyrics of Blurred Lines, and the cultural forces underlying the more literal meaning of those lyrics. And yet, take a talented and aware artist like Peaches, and the same could be said of her work, as well.
Hopefully, this didn’t come off antagonistic, and too naïve. Basically, consider any insights that can be made between Blurred Lines and Joe’s Garage.
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Blurred Lines is just bad, bad, bad so-called music. Do you really like that shouting crap? This from a guy in love with Royals–my sophistication of music is love of Vivaldi (classic music’s pop), R. Strauss’s Four Last Songs and Lorde for crissake. Purist? Not in my life. But Thicke? The music, the message, everything, Sucks the very suck out of suck without remainder. Defending it is like defending nihilism–not properly motivated by virtue of assertion.
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Hi Alan, I don’t know if your comment was directed at me. Just suppose it was. First of all, I don’t like Blurred Lines. (It doesn’t sound good to me, just as Royals doesn’t sound good to me, independent of lyrical content. That doesn’t take away the great formal qualities of both songs.) I’m proposing a thought experiment. So instead of Blurred Lines, substitute Royals with lyrics that are at a first-order level very offensive. (Yeah, you get a different song, but minus some of the formal changes at the lyrical level, you get the same song at the formal level as well as at the substantive/content level, basically.) Then compare this new Royals, call it Royals*, with many of the songs on Joe’s Garage. And then furthermore suppose that you have two works with the same quality at the formal level (and indeed, I would say this is a stretch.) Then make the further suppositions that I stipulated in my earlier post. Would Joe’s Garage be sexist, dumb, violent in the ways that some think that Blurred Lines is, and by supposition, Royals*? Just a point for discussion. I’ve raised the issue/discussion, now I’m going to leave it, and work on some papers:)
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Joel–
Not at you at all, at all. I hate that song, though I do like much music that more refined ears detest. Nothing more than that. If I have one resolution for the new year, it is not to troll, or attack people I do not know, or to contribute to the incivility of blogs. So we’re good.
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Thanks Alan,
Perhaps I was too harsh on Royals (but I just can’t get myself to appreciate it the way a number of my friends have done immediately). I too had a resolution, but it was not be as sheepish as I typically am, so that’s why I came off more aggressively than my friends and colleagues know me as. I’m glad that I didn’t come off as defending Blurred Lines:)
To everyone else,
I realize that Joe’s Garage invites a larger question of how machine-like us human beings are capable of becoming through powerful forces and our ignorance and laziness (myself being the first to admit to such a thing:)). If this is right, then I realize that my comparison between Blurred Lines and Joe’s Garage might not get off the ground, since whatever Thicke says, he doesn’t invite this much larger question. Additionally, this larger (I’m not saying more important) question provides context for the offensive songs on the album that doesn’t seem to be present with Thicke’s Blurred Lines. Well, I thought I was onto something. If anyone thinks it’s still something to ponder/comment on, cool. But I’m off the table.
Once again, thanks Alan, and happy new years!
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Your misconstruction of what I’m saying above is so blatant, that I don’t even know where to start. (But for starters: nobody but you has been talking about censoring, and it’s a gross misrepresentation of what I say above to say that I am putting the gravity of BL on a par with the gravity of the gang rape in India or Newtown.) To top it up, you manage to express your opinions in such an unpleasant way that I for one do not feel like engaging in any kind of debate with you. (I know that Protevi has also adopted a problematic tone in some of his comments and that you were responding to that, but you ended up adopting the same tone with everybody else, including me.)
So while I am not going to un-publish your comments, I am not going to spend any time responding to them either. For an example of a debate that can be productive, see the exchange between Alan White and Joel Dittmer above.
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“Your misconstruction of what I’m saying above is so blatant, that I don’t even know where to start. (But for starters: nobody but you has been talking about censoring, and it’s a gross misrepresentation of what I say above to say that I am putting the gravity of BL on a par with the gravity of the gang rape in India or Newtown.) ”
You’re flat wrong Novaes. After mentioning Newtown and gang rape in 2012, you write (from the OP):
“And now, looking back on 2013, what strikes me as an absolute lowlight of the year is again something gender-related, at first sight of a much lesser degree of gravity – but only at first sight. One of the biggest hits of the year, Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’, is nothing short of a badly concealed rape apology (read the lyrics for yourself here).”
That is as straightforward an assertion that the gravity of Thicke’s song is on par with gang rape as one could ask for. Please don’t try to disown that now, unless you’re willing to explicitly retract it. And as I’ve gone some way toward explaining, I think that the characterization of this song as a ‘rape apology’ is off. That’s not to say I think the song is in good taste. But let’s not equate its ‘gravity’ with Newtown or gang rape.
Finally, before you back out of the conversation, I invite you to look over my remark at 15 again. It’s hardly unpleasant, and not too hard to address.
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Also, you should note that I have been representing you (and Protevi) as someone interesting in CENSURING those responsible for the song, not any kind of CENSORING of it, as you write above. And it’s clear you’re going in for censuring here. So again, your attempt to pin me with a “gross misrepresentation” of what you say is wrong.
I don’t know what you’re looking for by way of pleasant conversation, but the way this thread has developed has left me with a suspicion that one side is driven more by a desire for ideological purity than an interest in conversing with and considering what the other side is saying. I’m willing to be convinced otherwise, but as of now, this seems to be the state of play.
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Ok, let’s do some logic here. I start with the statement that BL may appear to be of a much lesser degree of gravity than the gang rape episode and Newtown, and then say that this is a false appearance. So I’m denying the much lesser claim, but this does not entail a claim of equal gravity for these two sets of episodes. You’re the one drawing this unwarranted conclusion from what I said.
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Also, note that I was representing you (and Protevi) as calling for a CENSURING of those responsible for the song, not a CENSORING of the song itself, as you write above. And it’s clear that censuring has been called for. So again, your attempt to pin me with a “gross misrepresentation” of your view is wrong.
I don’t know what you’re looking for by way of pleasant conversation, but looking over this discussion it seems like one side is driven more by an interest in ideological purity than in conversing with and trying to understand their interlocutors. I’m willing to be convinced otherwise, should I see the right kind of activity, but as of now this seems to be the state of play.
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Fair enough. So how then do you rank the gravity of this song, since you concede that you’re willing to compare it to gang rape? We’ve established you don’t suppose they are equal, but also that the song is not much less worse than gang rape. That’s enough for my purposes–I find it simply obscene to say that this song is not much less worse than a gang rape.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julia-kacmarek/rape-culture-is_b_3368577.html
‘Rape culture’ is not an unproblematic concept, but it does have the advantage of pointing out that rape does not arise in a vacuum.
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There’s a world of difference between recognizing that “rape does not arise in a vacuum” and asserting that Thicke’s song is comparable to gang rape. It takes quite a bit more work to defend that latter claim.
Also, post 36 is a duplicate of 34; feel free to delete either.
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“…asserting that Thicke’s song is comparable to gang rape.” Nobody asserted that.
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I’m sorry Novaes, I thought we had just established as common ground that you think, as you write in the OP, that Thicke’s song is a “gendered atrocity” that is, despite first appearances, not much less worse than the “gang rape episode” you note in post 35.
If that is right, then not only do you consider gang rape and Thicke’s song comparable, you think the latter is not much less worse than the former.
You seem to be going through some convoluted mental gymnastics to get yourself out of a position you’re fairly squarely standing in. Better to disavow it explicitly and try again, I think. And at any rate, since despite your protestations you seem interested in conversing after all, I invite you to consider my questions at post 15.
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P. Stovall writes, “You’re sporting quite the persecution complex Protevi; it doesn’t become you.”
Folks around here seem to find it pretty easy to throw around accusations like ‘[sporting a persecution complex]’. I would think this sort of thing would be particularly verboten when made within the same [comment thread] one [pro]fesses to find the [practice of dismissively labeling one’s interlocutors condescending]. Proposal for the new year: let us endeavor to give our interlocutor a bit more thought before dismissing him or her (or shim, or whatever).
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Oh, and happy new year.
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Cute, Shenonymous. Here’s a critical difference. I’ve been engaging with Protevi and his view, while he has repeatedly, in private correspondence and publically in this forum, refused to address my concerns while portraying himself as being subject to the machinations of “mansplainers”. I am, on the other hand, not trying to portray myself as wronged or otherwise offended by his nonsense. This kind of twaddle means next to nothing to me, unless and until it results in some kind of better understanding or practice.
Seriously, if you all want to talk about “gendered atrocities” in 2013, talk about the woman who was raped for the SECOND TIME in December and then burned alive, dying on Dec. 31st.
http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/world/2014/01/03/lklv-kapur-india-rape-victim-father.cnn.html
To compare that kind of treatment to the lordosis behavior that “Blurred Lines” elicits is profane. To propose that we ought to be as outraged at Thicke’s song as we were at Newtown and another Indian gang-rape in 2012 is infuriating. And to say that instead we ought to hold “Blurred Lines” as “not much less worse” than a gang rape is no improvement.
So look shenonymous–if you choose to continue this conversation, I ask that you do more than copy-paste your way through a dismissal. I’m quite happy to vehemently disagree with you. But in doing so I want us to get somewhere, and that’s not going to happen unless you drop the glib hand-wringing and own up to the issues in play.
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And for the record, when I said “happy new year” I genuinely meant it. I wasn’t trying to score a rhetorical point.
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I’m going to try to spell out one more time what I take to be completely obvious, but apparently it isn’t. Nobody has ever said that gang rape in India/Newtown are on a par with what is disturbing about BL. For starters, nobody in their sane mind would deny that the perpetrators in the first cases are simply criminals who deserve to be punished by the appropriate legal means (though I regret that the perpetrators in India have been sentenced to death, as I am by principle against the death penalty in any circumstance), whereas nobody is saying that Thicke and the other authors of the song have committed any crime or deserve punishment. The point of the comparison (which was really just a way to get the post started; by focusing on it you are just picking on a red herring) was to say that, while it is absolutely clear what is atrocious about the gang rape in India (or the more recent case you link to), the problematic implications of a song like BL (and many others) are all too often overlooked, even though globally speaking (and not in terms of direct causal connection) there is arguably a relation between songs where guys claim to know what a woman wants sexually (despite appearances), and a climate conducive to rape. You can disagree with me on this latter claim, but insisting on the misunderstanding that I am saying that the two sets of events are comparable (in the sense of roughly of the same nature) is a misconstruction of what I’m saying above. I am indeed drawing a comparison between the two sets of events but precisely to argue that there is one (among many others) fundamental difference between them, namely that the gravity of the first set is widely recognized by everybody, whereas the problematic nature of BL and other similar manifestations in popular culture is still not sufficiently appreciated.
If you get so outraged about ‘real’ instances of rape, I’d suggest you could be interested not only in the more gruesome instances such as the two cases in India (more gruesome in particular because the victims have died as a result of the injuries), but also in cases closer to home. It is well known that the incidence of rape among the college population in the US (and possibly elsewhere) is disturbingly high, and you may ask yourself what factors contribute to it.
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More generally: I am not going to tolerate comments not strictly on the topic of the post, including comments on the previous behavior of commenters. (So comments like the one by She-nonymous above will also not be tolerated.) I am going to unpublish anything that I take to be inappropriate (on both ‘camps’), and if it looks like nothing constructive is going to come out of the discussion anymore, I’ll close off comments in the post.
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Hi Joel, I’m sorry that I never got around to replying to your comment. I think the comparison with ‘Joe’s Garage’ is intriguing; as you, I want to say that there is a difference between what Zappa was doing there and what Thicke et al do with BL, but I can’t quite put my finger on what the difference is. I’ll let you know if I come up with something sensible 🙂
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Hi Novaes–I can appreciate not wanting to have the conversation devolve into remarks on the behavior of other commenters, and I apologize for having contributed to that. Nevertheless, I do not think you are being fair to the dialectic when you tell me I’m focusing on a red herring. This is what you write in the OP:
“And now, looking back on 2013, what strikes me as an absolute lowlight of the year is again something gender-related, at first sight of a much lesser degree of gravity – but only at first sight. One of the biggest hits of the year, Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’, is nothing short of a badly concealed rape apology”
In a year where (as always) there was plenty of genuine gender atrocity to focus on, I find it disgusting (though I can’t tell whether my disgust is an ethical or merely aesthetic sentiment) that we are asked to compare the gravity of this song to a gang rape. Now you write:
“I am indeed drawing a comparison between the two sets of events but precisely to argue that there is one (among many others) fundamental difference between them, namely that the gravity of the first set is widely recognized by everybody, whereas the problematic nature of BL and other similar manifestations in popular culture is still not sufficiently appreciated.”
It is no defense of the claim that gang rape and Thicke’s song are comparable to say that the aim in making that claim is to get people to “sufficiently appreciate” that the “gravity” of the latter is not much less worse than the former. There is quite a lot of work that needs done to make these claims justifiable, or to translate them into any sort of meaningful course of action (ironically, as bjk notes above, your position is not unlike that of Tipper Gore in the 80’s and 90’s). As I have been maintaining throughout this discussion, the work that needs done to justify these claims is neither obvious nor likely to be easily accomplished (once again, I ask that you have a look at my questions at 15). And construing the song in terms of “rapeyness”, calling it a “rape apology”, is at best debatable, precisely because it ignores the aesthetic experience of those who enjoy the song. Nebulous claims about “rape culture” are no substitute for the work that needs done to justify the censuring of art that you are advocating.
Again, none of this is to say that I think the song is in good taste, or that the aesthetic sentiments it fosters are ones we ought to be glad our youth are exposed to. I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised that twerking gets more play in the club, but I wish it were as easy to find people who could dance to something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qGXqaIhqJc (from about the 2:30 mark until her scream at 2:50 Scott is positively awash in the divine). But you’re doing more than registering aesthetic displeasure at Thicke’s song–you are encouraging others to classify it according to a rape narrative on which such songs are, unknown to those who do not share the Right View, contributing to “a climate conducive to rape”.
Aesthetic experience is a rich form of human activity, permitting novel modes of collective action (consider a dance or the interplay of the symphony, chorus, band, and Scott’s voice in the song above) and calls to censure art because of a political agenda ought to be scrutinized. And that can be true even when we find the political agenda a worthy one.
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As I am sure you know, time is a scarce commodity in life. I am under no obligation to spend my time engaging in discussion with interlocutors who insist in distorting what I am saying, despite my sincere attempts at clarifying it and creating minimal conditions for a fruitful debate (this is why I never got to your questions at #15, because we haven’t even reached a level that I consider sufficiently conducive to productive debate). I also very much object to your use of heavy-handed vocabulary along the lines of ‘disgust’. So I choose to end my debate with you here.
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