Burning sensation when urinating, Robin Thicke, has revealed that he was high throughout much of the last year, which lead to both the dissolution of his marriage and his taking a lot of undue songwriting credit for ‘Blurred Lines’, the song that resurrected the once again moribund singing career of the one time bicycle messenger and launched a thousand think pieces on the word ‘rapey’.
The unsurprising revelations have to light as a result of the unsealing of previously confidential, sworn depositions submitted in April this year to a Los Angeles court. Thicke and his supposed contemporary Pharrell Williams are currently facing a plagiarism complaint submitted by the estate of Marvin Gaye, whose children allege that – along with T.I. – the two made an “unauthorised derivative” of their father’s 1977 classic ‘Got To Give It Up’ to considerable profit.
The depositions of Thicke and Williams, unearthed overnight by The Hollywood Reporter as part of a pre-emptive cross-complaint against Gaye’s children, include revelations that Thicke’s involvement in the songwriting process was largely overstated “to sell records” and resulted from a lethal cocktail of envy, “Vicodin and alcohol”. Per THR:
“The singer says under oath that after writing and producing six albums himself, “I was jealous and I wanted some of the credit… I tried to take credit for it later because [Williams] wrote the whole thing pretty much by himself and I was envious of that.”In his deposition, Thicke soon gets more specific:“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.”
When the attorney then plays the court a mash up of ‘Blurred Lines’ and ‘Got To Give It Up’, Thicke recognises that his version is “so hard to listen to. [Like] nails on a fucking chalkboard… This is [like] Stanley Kubrick’s movie Clockwork Orange. Where he has to sit there and watch… Mozart would be rolling in his grave right now.”
Thicke also says he didn’t do a single interview sober last year, and therefore any comments he made in the media regarding the influence of Gaye’s work on his own – comments which are being used as chief evidence by the Gayes’ – are unreliable. It’s basically the tl;dr equivalent of ‘It wasn’t me, it was all Pharrell. I was very high, Your Honour.’
Likewise, Pharrell’s deposition is also full to the brim with steaming horse shit and reveals that this kind of overstated involvement in the songwriting process “is what happens every day in our industry”.
When asked eight times to read music and point out individual notes on a score, noted producer of music Pharrell says he is “not comfortable”.
When asked whether Gaye had inspired his career, Pharrell responds in a typical fashion, “He’s an Aries. I respect him.”
When asked what exactly holds the song together in his opinion, Pharrell asserts it’s “Robin Thicke’s voice” and not the formal compositional elements. And why is that Pharrell?
“Because it’s the white man singing soulfully and we, unfortunately, in this country don’t get enough — we don’t get to hear that as often, so we get excited by it when the mainstream gives that a shot. But there’s a lot of incredibly talented white folk with really soulful vocals, so when we’re able to give them a shot — and when I say ‘we,’ I mean like as in the public gives them a shot to be heard, then you hear the Justin Timberlakes and you hear the Christina Aguileras and you hear, you know, all of these masterful voices that have just been given, you know, an opportunity to be heard because they’re doing something different.”
If you’re high right now and would like to trip balls on that kind of warped logic and unsound reasoning, you can read both depositions in full here and here.
