None of us at The Mary Sue can say we’re particularly big fans of the song “Blurred Lines” for reasons you can most likely guess on your own (and we’re betting most of you probably even share with us, too). But Robin Thicke wants us all to know know that despite taking so much credit for writing the song with Pharrell last year, he was totally way too hopped up on Vicodin and alcohol to actually contribute. Oh… okay?
Well, actually that’s not entirely accurate: by us, we mean he wants Marvin Gaye’s Estate to know, because they’re suing him. Apparently “Blurred Lines” is a little too close to Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” for their comfort, so Thicke and fellow song-writers Pharrell and Clifford “T.I.” Harris Jr (who for some reason never get as much flak as Thicke does) filed preemptive charges against the estate in August of last year, which they then countered in October.
The trial is set to begin next year in February, but The Hollywood Reporter recently obtained copies of a deposition Thicke gave in April, in which he basically threw his collaborators under the bus by claiming he was too messed up to do anything other than just sing the song:
“Q: Were you present during the creation of ‘Blurred Lines’?
Thicke: I was present. Obviously, I sang it. I had to be there.
Q: When the rhythm track was being created, were you there with Pharrell?
Thicke: To be honest, that’s the only part where — I was high on vicodin and alcohol when I showed up at the studio. So my recollection is when we made the song, I thought I wanted — I — I wanted to be more involved than I actually was by the time, nine months later, it became a huge hit and I wanted credit. So I started kind of convincing myself that I was a little more part of it than I was and I — because I didn’t want him — I wanted some credit for this big hit. But the reality is, is that Pharrell had the beat and he wrote almost every single part of the song.”
This is very different than the story Thicke was telling last year, when he said to GQ that “Pharrell and I were in the studio and I told him that one of my favorite songs of all time was Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got to Give It Up.’ I was like, ‘Damn, we should make something like that, something with that groove.'” But he also said during the deposition that he was also drunk and high for every interview he gave last year as well, so we shouldn’t take anything he said back then at face value because he was definitely lying. Um, yay?
Pharrell more or less confirmed Thicke’s non-involvement in his own deposition, saying, “This is what happens every day in our industry. You know, people are made to look like they have much more authorship in the situation than they actually do. So that’s where the embellishment comes in.” It’s also possible that Pharrell was too busying being the guy everybody loves for “Happy” and “Get Lucky” and let Thicke get all the negative attention for talking about how much he loved degrading women, or whatever. Smart move, Pharrell.
Either way, as dubious as the circumstances might be, it’s good to see taking him responsibility for his addictions and trying to clean up his act—he told the Gaye estate that he’d been sober for two months during the deposition because his wife left him. Maybe he’ll, I don’t know, learn the error of his ways and become a better person? Or at the very least, maybe no one will ever take him seriously again. The latter’s all that’s likely to happen, sadly.
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