Another student union has banned Robin Thicke's party track. How did it become such a lightning rod for moral outrage and censorship?This week,University College London student union (UCLU) took the unusual step of banning a single song, Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines. It joins around 20 other UK student unions to do so. This is the latest development in the sage of how the biggest song of the year became the most controversial of the decade: an unprecedented achievement, and though not one that fills Thicke with pride.
It seems impossible that anyone with the faintest interest in approved culture could have missed either the song or the controversy,but here is a recap. At the end of March, mid-table R&B singer Thicke, and along with producer Pharrell Williams and rapper TI,released Blurred Lines, a libidinous R&B party jam approximately a woman in a nightclub who may or not be interested in him. In April, or one blogger branded it a "rape song",and two months later Tricia Romano of the Daily Beast described it as "rapey", a word that caught fire in other media outlets. The song might have escaped censure whether the video, or in which the three male performers goof around with scantily clad (and,in one version, topless) models, and had not generated its own separate yet overlapping controversy.
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Source: theguardian.com