It’s fairly common to have foggy memories of getting wasted to “Blurred Lines” in the summer of 2013. The track features an audacious hook that makes you want to take a few shots and go hard; plus, when you eventually realize that “hey hey hey” isn’t leaving your brain anytime soon, you’ll have to turn to harder and harder drugs in a futile attempt to forget.
Given this universal trajectory of getting “Blurred Lines” blasted, it’s not a huge surprise that Robin Thicke had to shotgun Rush Limbaugh-levels of Vicodin on the daily in order to fever dream up this musical monstrosity in the first place.
According to an April 23 deposition, Thicke, despite hanging out with Pharrell all the time and getting to see Emily Ratajkowski naked, still suffers from sad dad levels of substance abuse. He told lawyers that during his “Blurred Lines” blue period, “I would take a Vicodin to start the day and then I would fill up a water bottle with vodka and drink it before and during my interviews.”
Thicke is claiming a substance-induced haze in order to protect himself from allegations that “Blurred Lines” is a cheap rip-off of Marvin Gaye’s 1977 hit “Got to Give it Up.”
The Gaye family, which is suing Thicke, Pharrell, and T.I. on the grounds of illegal imitation, cites a musicologist who identified a “constellation of at least eight substantially similar compositional features between the two works,” a sentence that Robin Thicke refuses to respond to because he is too high to understand it. While the bass lines and hooks of the two tracks are undoubtedly similar, Thicke still insists that to claim that “Blurred Lines” is plagiarized is “a musical impossibility”.
Taking a page out of the O.J. Simpson playbook, Thicke’s deposition clearly states that he did not copy Marvin Gaye’s work…but if he DID copy Marvin Gaye’s work, it’s only because he was totally obliterated and Pharrell’s silly hat made him do it. In a move that can only be described as rude, Thicke claims that, despite his 20 percent writing credit on the track, “Pharrell geniused the whole thing.”
Thicke wasn’t just too messed up to contribute anything to the creation of “Blurred Lines”—he was also just messed up enough to completely lie about it afterwards.
In what appears to retrospectively be a very stupid Billboard Magazine interview back in July, Thicke explained that, “Pharrell and I were in the studio making a couple records, and then on the third day, I told him I wanted to do something kinda like Marvin Gaye's 'Got To Give It Up,' that kind of feel 'cause it's one of my favorite songs of all time. So he started messing with some drums and then he started going 'hey, hey, hey' and about an hour and a half later we had the whole record finished."
Again, it’s important to reiterate the fact that a very-not-sober Thicke lied about his role in the studio and thus confessed to musical plagiarism in order to get credit for writing “Blurred Lines,” a song that everyone wished had never been written about a week after it came out.
Also, at the time of his deposition Thicke had been off of pills for two months, because his wife left him in February. So in case you were wondering just what Robin Thicke’s been up to since summer 2013…he’s been killing the game.
