The best selling single of 2013 spent twelve weeks at number one, got banned from student bars across Britain, and ended with a jury ordering its writers to hand over millions of dollars and half their future royalties.
Here is what the title refers to, what the argument was actually about, and why the court case changed how songwriters think about influence.
The Short Answer
The blurred line is the one between a woman saying no and a man deciding she means yes. The narrator tells a woman in a relationship that he can see what she really wants, and that he knows better than the answer she is giving him. Robin Thicke has said he wrote it about his wife. The title describes the problem it was accused of.
The Story Behind the Song
It was written and recorded in 2012 by Thicke, Pharrell Williams and Clifford Harris, the rapper T.I., who added a verse. Williams produced it. Trial documents later put the songwriting split at 65 percent Williams, 22 percent Thicke and 13 percent Harris.
Interscope released it on March 26, 2013. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 for twelve weeks, spent forty-eight weeks on the chart, sixteen weeks atop the R&B and hip-hop chart, and sold five million American downloads in twenty-two weeks, the fastest any song had done that to date. It reached number one in fourteen countries.
Two versions of the video were released. The unrated one, with the models topless, was pulled from YouTube within a week for breaching the site’s nudity rules.
Why did it get banned?
Student unions objected to the consent politics. Edinburgh removed it from its venues in September 2013 under a policy on sexual violence, and Leeds, Derby, Kingston, West of Scotland, the University of London and University College London followed.
The objection centred on the chorus, in which the narrator asserts that he knows what the woman wants, a phrase repeated more than a dozen times across the record, alongside a description of her as a good girl. Hollie O’Connor of Derby’s student union said the song objectified women and excused rape culture. Kirsty Haigh of Edinburgh’s association said it promoted an unhealthy attitude toward sex and consent. A television advertisement using the song and the models was banned from daytime broadcast by the Advertising Standards Authority.
What did Thicke say?
That the reading was ridiculous, that he has always respected women, and that people in positions of power in Britain had misunderstood the record. He told the BBC he wrote it about his wife Paula Patton, that she is the good girl in question, and that he knew what she wanted because they had been together twenty years.
He has since expressed regret about the backlash while maintaining he never intended the meaning critics found. The defence has not persuaded many people, partly because a song can mean something its author did not decide.
Was the criticism fair?
The strongest version of the case against is that the record supplies a script: a man who treats refusal as a formality, set to a groove designed to make you agree with him. In 2013, as American campuses were beginning a public reckoning with sexual assault, that script landed badly and the song became a reference point in the argument.
The strongest version of the case for is that the narrator is a character, that the lyric describes a woman already interested rather than one refusing, and that reading the title as a confession assumes what it sets out to prove. Some academic treatments have read the tension as flirtation rather than coercion. Both readings survive contact with the words, which is why the argument never ended.
What was the Marvin Gaye lawsuit about?
Whether the song copied Gaye’s 1977 single “Got to Give It Up.” Thicke had said publicly that Gaye’s record was on his mind in the studio and that the new song was meant as an homage.
In July 2013 Gaye’s estate and Funkadelic’s publisher separately contacted Thicke and Williams alleging infringement. Thicke offered a six-figure settlement, which the Gaye family rejected. In August, Thicke, Williams and Harris filed pre-emptively for a court declaration that they had not infringed. The family countersued.
What did the jury decide?
In March 2015 a Los Angeles jury found for the Gaye estate and awarded $7.3 million, later reduced by the judge to $5.3 million. T.I. was cleared of any responsibility.
The detail that made the verdict contentious is that the jurors never heard either recording. The Gaye estate held copyright in the sheet music only, so the trial turned on notes and chords on paper rather than on the two records as they sound. The Ninth Circuit upheld the verdict in March 2018 by two votes to one, and in December 2018 the case closed with a judgment of about $4.98 million plus interest and half the song’s future royalties.
Why did musicians worry about the verdict?
Because it appeared to protect a feel rather than a composition. The dissenting appeals judge, Jacqueline Nguyen, wrote that the decision let the Gaye family accomplish what nobody had managed before, which was to copyright a musical style.
Songwriters and lawyers have cited the case ever since as the point at which borrowing an era became legally risky, and it is now standard practice to add defensive credits to anything that resembles an older record.
How is it remembered?
As the most argued-about pop song of its decade. Rolling Stone called it the worst song of the year. It also spent three months at number one and defined the summer it came out.
Thicke’s career did not recover from either controversy. Williams went on to have the biggest year of his life. The song sits in an unusual position: enormously successful, widely disliked, and legally settled against the people who made it.
Records this ubiquitous get remembered as arguments rather than as songs, which makes them oddly hard to place later; when you have the hook and not the name, our song lyrics search finds it.