In Defense of a Song I Despise (Blurred Lines)

Let me preface this with stating my disdain for the song, 'Blurred Lines.' I'm not a fan. I'm anything but. If it were on a playlist of my choosing, it would rank somewhere just slightly above anything by Creed. It's massive popularity only infuriates me further and makes me wanna seek out any and all excuses to discredit its purity and stomp it into the ground altogether.

And I was recently given a chance to do just that. The family of Marvin Gaye recently sued Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams and won big to the tune of $7.4 million. 'Blurred Lines,' sounds a lot like Marvin Gaye's, 'Got to Give it Up.' A LOT. Once you hear the two songs back-to-back, it's impossible to ignore their similarities. So why am I not happy? Why am I not taking this opportunity to kick dirt on a song I despise?

I find all music (and art for that matter) to be derivative in some capacity. Everything new that is created owes a part of itself to something old. Nothing is beyond influence.  I don't think, 'Blurred Lines,' made a carbon copy of, 'Got to Give it Up.' I think they were chasing an extremely similar sound and it ended up close enough for a jury to rule in the favor of Marvin Gaye. But what in music isn't copying something else? Nothing is wholly new and original. Every musician has heroes and libraries filled with their favorite artists that have crept up into the crawlspace of their minds to manifest themselves as ghosts during the song writing process.

I dare you to write a song that doesn't sound like anything else. There's no new chord progression. There's no combo of instruments you can try that hasn't been done already. As time passes, so does the total expanse of all songs ever written. It's getting harder and harder to write a song that doesn't sound like any other song ever. There's never been a more difficult time in history to accomplish such a feat than right now.

And this is no knock on Marvin Gaye. The dude wrote amazing music that's still relevant 30-40 years later. That's impressive. That's not song theft. That's idolatry. That's the old school that can never detach itself from the new school because the new school always grows from the dirt of the old school. We pay homage to our past by using the tools they provided us to build into the future. It's the circle and it can't be broken.

So for all you, 'get off my lawn/our music is better than the kids' music today,' fogies that victoriously raised your pitchforks and butterscotch into the air over this, I say give it a rest. Most of your argument is based on the idea that music today sounds different than it used to. But if a jury can award the family of Marvin Gaye $7.4 million 35 years later, maybe it's time to admit the music's not as different and scary as you make it out to be. Maybe you just got old and gave up on relevance. And that's too bad because the music you grew up with didn't.