The Robin Thicke song “Blurred Lines” is the subject of some fairly heated copyright litigation that won’t go away. If you haven’t heard, Marvin Gaye’s estate is suing Robin Thicke, Pharrell Williams, and T.I. for allegedly infringing the copyright on Gaye’s song, “Got to Give it Up.” It’s fairly easy to find compilations of the two songs on YouTube or SoundCloud, and the songs are definitely similar. You can’t hear “Blurred Lines” without envisioning a 1970s Oldsmobile festooned with a bunch of young people in polyester hanging on and out of it, bouncing through a hazy orange, brown, and yellow New York City and a lot of singing, dancing and clapping. Maybe a burst fire hydrant is spewing all over the place. And that evocation is by design. Both are those kinds of songs. (And seriously, someone surely had to have made the pun that Blurred Lines has blurred the lines between the two songs, right? I know I can’t be the first.)
Resurrecting Popular Culture
Where this case gets interesting to me is that pop music is all about the homage right now. When I took Psychology 301 as an undergrad at the University of Texas, the professor spent a day talking about how we tend to have a 25- to 30-year nostalgia cycle. In other words, popular culture was dredging things up from 25 or 30 years prior, and adapting them for the contemporary era. The discussion at that time, since it was the late ’90s, was in reference to the reintroduction of the VW Beetle, the popularity of bands like Oasis, and fashion that incorporated bell-bottom jeans, bead necklaces, round sunglasses, tie-dye, and long stringy hair, all tropes from the late ’60s, early ’70s. This wasn’t to say that such era-checks were the sole popular trend at the time (this was also the era of Britney Spears, midriff-baring t-shirts, and cannon-leg jeans), but that it was an interesting phenomenon to make note of.
Feeling the Era
Pharrell recently finished testifying in the lawsuit brought by Marvin Gaye’s family, and he testified that he didn’t “copy” “Give it Up”; rather, when asked whether he felt that “Blurred Lines” captured the feel of the era, he acknowledged that it was indeed the feel that he was aiming for, but it wasn’t infringement. And right now, pop music is feeling the ’70s and ’80s. Bruno Mars’s “Uptown Funk,” which sounds like PFunk, is currently doing quite well; Taylor Swift’s 1989 is full of ’80s references (“Welcome to New York” basically sounds like leg warmers, leotards, head bands, neon, and that weird kaleidoscopic effect seen in Chemical Brother’s “Let Forever Be” video); Drake’s “Hold On, We’re Going Home,” sounds like late-night AM radio; Daft Punk had their most commercial success by collaborating with Pharrell and Nile Rodgers (and others) for “Get Lucky.” Maroon 5 is doing some ’80s-sounding stuff right now, and I swear one of the lines in a currently popular song is directly lifted from a song from the ’80s, but I just can’t place it. In any event, the list goes on.
Bands have definitely been tagged with copyright infringement when they infringe and are found not to have negotiated a license or haven’t paid the mechanical license available for a cover. The most famous example is probably the Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” whose opening strains were found to infringe on an orchestral version of the Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time.” A license was negotiated, but a claim was made that the Verve went too far. Very complicated, and there was a settlement.
I definitely look forward to seeing what happens with the Marvin Gaye lawsuit. One thing is almost certain, though: whatever the judgment, someone’s probably going to appeal.
