blurred lines

Among the many medical procedures that involve doing something disgusting to your body in order to fix it, few have crept into the index of interpersonal communication quite like expression. You do it to the blisters on your feet, the pimples on your neck; you hire a professional to express your dog’s overripe anal glands or the cyst latched onto your vertebrae devouring your spinal fluid; and, of course, you express your self. All of these practices seem to coalesce into one of modernity’s favorite axioms: out with the bad, in with the good. Something has welled up inside that pocket of unsightly gray tissue and the quickest way to deal with it is by forcefully removing it. It’s easier in the physical cases, where the culprit is observable — a substance, a fluid, something viscous and sticky through which you can drag your finger. We’re not so lucky with regards to the self and its covalent henchmen emotion and idea — who exist not in diagnosable form but as unknowable, linguistic abstractions — but that doesn’t stop us from trying to identify them and extract them from our bodies. They’re in the remote control hurled across the living room during overtime, the bacchanalian fury grinded out at electronic music festivals, and the desperate sonnet composed while gazing into the unyielding immortal shroud of the 18th-century English wilderness. We all know “feelings,” “ideas,” and “selves” to be just as in need of expression as any dermal abscess. And as soon as we purge them, we’re free to attempt normality once again because they’re gone. Or dormant, or hiding, or recharging, or refracting.

One such refraction is 2013’s explosive single “Blurred Lines,” authored by Robin Thicke, Pharrell Williams, and, as recently found by federal jury verdict, Marvin Gaye. A two-year lawsuit, chaperoned by an inexorable social media craze, resulted in an early March 2015 decision that the copyright infringement claim initiated by Gaye’s children was legitimate, and that Thicke and Williams were liable for violating the copyright of Gaye’s 1977 hit “Got to Give it Up.” The decision, like all copyright decrees, renders the 2013 song theft, and thereby the two songs, in their uncanny similarity, the same. It’s the latest installment in the American government’s recent series of ontological rearrangements: corporations are people, pizza is a vegetable, and “Blurred Lines” is “Got to Give it Up.”

The crux of the decision is the idea-expression dichotomy of copyright infringement law, which attempts to distinguish between the idea of a work (“procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle,” etc., according to 17 U.S.C. § 102(b), which is a rollercoaster of a document) and its expression. But, as the law holds, if the idea and expression are indistinguishable, then the two are “merged,” for legal purposes, and therefore not sheltered by copyright. As is often the case with new music — keep an eye out for Chuck Berry v. Meghan Trainor — style seems to enter the public domain very quickly. At least, this is the argument that Thicke and Williams’s legal team deployed: Marvin Gaye may be a pioneer of the dreamy yet energetic soul groove of the seventies, but he doesn’t own it. He can’t own the idea, only its expression.

The defense’s argument that “Blurred Lines” is merely an homage echoes Fredric Jameson’s interpretation of the early postmodern nostalgia films, in that “by reinventing the feel and shape” of Gaye’s sound, Thicke and Williams seek to “reawaken a sense of the past” associated with it. Copyright law accounts for this type of reinvention as “incidents, characters or setting which are as a practical matter indispensable, or at least standard in the treatment of a given topic.” If you’re writing a story about witches, you’re allowed to use broomsticks and cauldrons and incantations; nobody owns these tropes. You’re allowed to use lyrical phrases like “Shake around, get up, get down” even when they sound awfully similar to Gaye’s “Move it up, turn it round, shake it down.” Some stylistic elements are just unavoidably synonymous with genre — so argued the defense.

But beyond all this convoluted legalese, if the question is whether “Blurred Lines” is homage or theft, pastiche or blatant regurgitation, the answer might be that there’s no way to tell, and maybe no real difference. Even the judge who set the current precedent on these laws — someone auspiciously named Judge Learned Hand — agreed that “nobody has ever been able to fix that boundary, and nobody ever can.” That ruling happened in 1930, and since then the nature of the boundary has often cropped up not only as a legal issue but also in the struggle of symbolism and identity. Jameson called it the death of the subject, Barthes the death of the author; Walter Benjamin had nightmares about the expressionless allegory, the splintered gushing torso of a symbol both packed with and leaning towards significance.

It’s a volatile case of imagery, representation, and the confusing relationship of seeming like something to being that thing. These are linguistic concerns, like whether the word dog conjures up the image of a dog, of your dog, or of the very idea of what it means to be a dog. But, regrettably, no one will ever know what it means to be a dog, so we have to approximate the experience with symbols and signifiers. Sometimes signifiers get out of hand, as in this case: does the song represent/refer to the Marvin Gaye sound, or is it the Marvin Gaye sound? Were these singers expressing a self that doesn’t belong to them? Luckily, we have elected and appointed official spokespeople to sharpen the blurred lines between sign and referent; to tidy and redress the blotchy, seeping gauze of significations when their essence starts to bleed; to make sure that each linguistic symbol refers to its concept, just as each crime has its criminal, each property has its taxable owner, and each song has its author.

The identical nature of the two songs seems obvious, now that the judicial system has declared it so. The “feel” or “vibe” in both songs is nearly identical; it just needed that legal push into the realm of the actually identical. It’s theft, which means that some entity has been transposed by a malicious hand, like how a Snickers bar exists at one moment on its 7-Eleven shelf, then the next moment in the balmy confines of a preteen’s sleeve. The Snickers has shifted locations, but if you check back on that shelf, you’re guaranteed to find it, nestled peacefully between the Almond Joys and the Honeybuns, right where it always was and always will be. It’s the same with Gaye’s hit. Some sniveling adolescent has swiped it from Gaye’s soulful brain and put it somewhere else, but you can still go on YouTube and funk out to it any time you please. And now, because of this verdict, there are two of it. Twice the scorching hi-hat and jittery cowbell and tumbling bassline composition, twice the retro-soul butt-shaking groove, twice the mystified and covetous lyrical content.

Of course, the lyrics were the other social media craze that the 2013 single created. Droves of enraged bloggers and news outlets and my Facebook friends rallied against the song’s intimidating sexual narrative: several male suitors proposition the indistinct (but explicitly female) “you” with desperate volleys of alcohol, drugs, and liberation. Coupled with the risqué music video, which features topless supermodels bopping alongside the besuited male singers, this unit of alleged misogyny and sexual violence saw Thicke, Williams, and (ft.) T.I. quickly condemned as purveyors of rape culture. One article paired the lyrics with Project Unbreakable to highlight rhetorical similarity between the single and the roster of common justifying assertions grunted by sexual assailants. The photo series catalogs victims of assault and abuse holding stark white placards sharpied with quotes from their attackers, which, unsurprisingly, often mirror lyrics like “I know you want it,” “You’re a good girl,” and “I’ll give you something big enough to tear your ass in two.”

But misogynistic hostility of verse is as old as time, from the protective masculine clutch of “I want to hold your hand,” to the threat of withholding capital (and fashion) security in “Who’s going to buy you ribbons when I’m gone?” to the patriarchal reassurance of “Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,” which compassionately provides the same diminutive feminine “you” with the comfort it clearly lacks as a result of an absent male figure. It’s in the incoherent daze of a woman deprived of her physical senses — Wordsworth’s “She neither hears nor sees,” which Thicke deftly inverts in his opening contemplation “Maybe I’m going deaf / Maybe I’m going blind,” as the sympathetic onlooker beginning to take on the somatic disadvantage of his subject. It’s even encoded in the meter of one of the English language’s earliest compositions, “Dream of the Rood,” as the honorific pedestal onto which God (“before all men”) holds “Mary herself over all womankind,” an image to which Thicke clearly alludes when he sings “you the hottest bitch in this place.”

We’re dealing with the contemporary iteration of the Madonna-whore complex, wherein the only difference between a “good girl” and an “animal” is her place within the linguistic structure laid out by its male cartographer. He ties her down with identifying language: she is a good girl, she is an animal. Her fixed self is not merely observed, but decided and contained by these sentences. In this case they’re spoken by Thicke and Williams, but these names are pronouns, signs whose long list of antecedents stretches into infinity. They are the freshest cross-section of a linguistic paradigm produced and perpetuated by the likes of McCartney, Lennon, Paul Clayton, the dubiously conglomerate Shakespeare, the interjectory fusion of reggae men known as Magic!, whoever wrote the Don Quixote, Caedmon, the unidentifiable Pearl Poet, and Marvin Gaye.

Beyond the feel or vibe of Gaye’s original song, “Blurred Lines” copies the vague suggestion of its language. Just as Gaye’s falsetto narrator pleads You’ve got to give it up, Thicke repeats the catchy thrusting phrase I know you want it with the implication that the “it” here represents his cock. The reference is solidified by the censored version of the music video’s conclusive inscription “ROBIN THICKE HAS A BIG D” (spelled out in shiny balloons fastened to the floor of the studio), as if viewers watch the redacted version and wonder what’s at the end of that couplet or what’s jiggling beneath Emily Ratajkowski’s pale elbow or “what rhymes with hug me?” Fortunately, the uncensored version exists to readily confirm that “D” stands for “DICK” (bulbous, buoyant, wafting at hip-level), and that those supermodels, you guessed it, have perky jugs. The rhyming, circular pairing of Robin Thicke’s genitals with his name is presented as a given — of course you know what rhymes with hug me — but only when revealed as the mighty, unaccommodated tetragram in a flash of transcendent epiphany no different from the mountaintop revelation of the homogeneous tautology “I am that I am.”

What neither “Blurred Lines” nor parent entity (and, now, transubstantial) “Got to Give it Up” makes clear is what it is — the thing you’ve got to give up, the thing the singer knows you want. It is the most basic pronoun in the book, open to as many potential referents as the concept of misogyny has authors. Where the two singles (one single) differ is in their presentation of it. Gaye in 1977, after lamenting his wallflower status as if the listener were an audio diary, confronts the you among “all the young ladies” to confess that “I know what you thinkin baby / You wanna turn me out,” eventually concluding with the ad nauseam (but extremely listenable) repetition of the title phrase. Whatever it is — the power of dance, the grail of knowledge, that ass, “that thing” — it must be delivered, presented, surrendered. You have no choice, you’ve got to, and there just might be some consequences if you don’t. But by 2013, the singer seems to have somehow wavered in this archaic sense of personal responsibility. The suggestion, “got to,” has shifted into the projected desire of the “want,” finally relinquishing the sovereignty so often silenced in bureaucratic language like this (“You should,” “You shall,” “You ought to,” “You must”; essential keywords in the quest for power over people, as evident in parental demands, the entreating rhetoric of Buzzfeed lists, the Amtssprache of the National Socialist Party, and the Ten Commandments). And in this ethical transmogrification, this admission that the target has its own autonomous motivation and desire, so too has the pronoun transformed, from the thing that the singer wants (the lady) to the singer himself. It used to be that she had no choice, that she had to fuck; now, her choice is all that matters — but Thicke knows what her choice is, declares and determines it.

The other side of these imagined conversations isn’t presented, though we can probably infer from the increasing desperation in the male speakers that their tactics aren’t working, and that each singer (the same singer) gets stuck in the robot-like feedback loop of his respective phrase of solicitation. You’ve got to give it up and I know you want it are the same sentence. Neither is inspiration or referent of the other. They convey the same expression of downright horniness on a potential mate whose inferred lack of interest and extreme interest are simultaneous. She wants it, but she also can’t help but give it up. He pressures her, but he’s also sure, somehow, that it was all her idea.

Before this verdict, there was a distinction between the referents behind these pronouns it, you, and I, and they held signifying value in the differentiation between what they stood for. Now, with the help of the government, we can realize that they stand for the same thing, that the it is the dick and the tits and the fucking that the song teases, the obvious smutty rhyme, the finishing of the sentence. It is the transcendental signifier our culture has so woefully lacked since the decline of metaphysics and structuralism. The it, like the song, stripped of its referential ability, goes from being a record of the thing to being the thing itself. Similarly, the I and you, the ego exterior from the Other, the two signs whose only differentiating factor is each other, have conflated. The male and female referents of these lyrics are both the subject and object simultaneously, and the pronouns that used to separate these two songs now bring them together. There is no likeness, there is no uncanny resemblance, no choice, no refusal: there is only it, the word, uttered long ago and every day since by a being whose identity can only be expressed, never known.

The law’s relationship to ontology has never been more clear: it ratifies, defines, and reconfigures being for our safety and benefit. It provides the suggestion for what stands for what, and it does so in the sanctity of old granite courthouses and depositions and monetary settlements, rather than in the rousting beats of artists like Marvin Gaye or Robin Thicke. It’s no secret that the first step in fixing a problem is its identification, especially when its identity is so unfixed as in a pronoun like it, so vast as in an entire species constantly trying to bone down on each other. But, thankfully, democracy has ceded that adjudicating role to a handful of detached and objective arbiters whose sole capacity is in the declaration of signifying relationships. A person who commits a crime is guilty, someone who meets the definition of terrorist is a terrorist, and these two songs are each other. Balance is restored, meaning carefully tucked back into symbol, and the judges slink back into their chambers until the next time the lines blur.

But what about T.I., who eerily skirted the infringement charges? He was found not liable, presumably because of his relatively miniscule contribution to the song. But Thicke, who admitted to having almost nothing to do with it creatively, was found responsible for more of the compensation even than Williams, who everyone agrees wrote almost every lyric and melody of the song. T.I. made $700,000 from “Blurred Lines” and appears to have escaped with it intact, along with his identity. The court has decided that he is not a thief, as he affirms in his post-trial statement: “I don’t steal from anybody.” But as this case shows, expression is not a matter of stealing, nor of resemblance and plagiarism, but of subsumption. Thicke and Williams’s crime was of replicating the Gaye vibe so closely that they actually became it. But not T.I., who warned years ago (“You can take the fame and the chedda”) of his transcendence from the earthly, material concerns of capitalist systems, the most heinous of which, prison, he seems to phase in and out of at will. And, as if he’s been waiting for it, this recent freedom from linguistic containment flags his ascent beyond the symbol, and beyond the concept it arbitrarily attempts to confine.

Even his stage name, the inversion of a pronoun whose meaninglessness has never been more evident, evades all structural entanglement. Ask anybody on Yahoo! Answers what T.I. stands for, and they’ll all tell you something different. The truth is that it doesn’t stand for anything, and nothing stands for it. Clifford Harris, Tip — those personas are gone, morphed into the spectral rapping energy removed from all equations of signified-signifier, drifting outside the cage of symbol and reference. And the more we try to dump meaning into him, the more he deflects it, like a trick birthday candle or that thing at the end of Akira, just as vaguely comprehensible and contributive as his fleeting verse on the single. T.I. is independent of rhythm, structure, language, affairs of authorship and propriety. Is he a spirit, a doppelganger, some sort of cosmic shadow cast by an object that will never exist? No. These are just words, expressions of an idea far more sinister.

 

Patrick Corley is a graduate student in film, theatre, and television at Northwestern University.

Art by Meagan Day and Hannah Klein


 
 
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