Why blurred lines is offensive

He said Blurred Lines was the turning point for him but he admitted that at first he "didn't get" why the song received such a backlash by some. The song - which was a collaboration with Robin Thicke - includes lines such as "I hate these blurred lines, I know you want it" and "Must wanna get nasty".

The singer said he saw that some women really liked the song and would sing those type of lyrics all the time. Or the way I think about things.

And I was like 'Got it. I get it. He added: "I realised that we live in a chauvinist culture in our country. I hadn't realised that.

Didn't realise that some of my songs catered to that. So that blew my mind. The single, which Pharrell recorded with Robin Thicke and T. Song content. Some of my old songs, I would never write or sing today.

I get embarrassed by some of that stuff. It just took a lot of time and growth to get to that place. Because there were older white women who, when that song came on, they would behave in some of the most surprising ways ever. And I would be like, wow. They would have me blushing. So when there started to be an issue with it, lyrically, I was, like, What are you talking about? There are women who really like the song and connect to the energy that just gets you up. They pointedly replaced it on the album with a new song called Freedom of Speech.

That moral panic was driven by older, more conservative campaigners, but much of the current opposition to pop's excesses stems from young feminists. If the MTV generation was the first to be exposed to the power of music videos, then the YouTube generation is the first to understand those videos in the context of social media and online discourse. Cultural consumers have never been more attuned to the messages, both explicit and implicit, embedded in popular artforms.

Arguments about racism, misogyny and cultural appropriation that used to thrive primarily in academia are now mainstream. Sometimes these concerns about "problematic" art go to comical extremes — the Tumblr Your Fave Is Problematic leaves you wondering if there is anything out there that isn't problematic — but at least young consumers are asking the right questions, in the spirit of playwright August Wilson's axiom: "All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.

Even the most prominent model in the Blurred Lines video, Emily Ratajkowski, has said: "I'm glad that people are criticising pop lyrics, because I think that's an important thing to do.

Many people who follow pop music closely, however, are surprised that Blurred Lines has become such a lightning rod.

Maybe it's an easy target because Robin Thicke is kind of slimy. Right now there's a lot of tension between women and men online so this was a way of women taking a piece of pop culture and saying: 'No, we're against this. Blurred Lines is not about rape in the same way that Cop Killer is about the fantasy of killing cops, so it is a question of interpretation. If you don't think the song's narrator is willing to have sex without consent, then the song seems at worst sleazy, and the reaction overblown.

If, however, you think that the concept of "blurred lines" sends a dangerous message to listeners, then it's explosive. Thicke himself has been a woeful defender of the song in interviews, recalling Spinal Tap's response to being called sexist: "What's wrong with being sexy? But it is revealing that TI's verse, which features the inflammatory line: "I'll give you something big enough to tear your ass in two," has been replaced in televised performances with milder verses from rappers such as Iggy Azalea and the Roots' Black Thought.

The video is another matter. It was conceived and directed by Diane Martel, who told US website Grantland : "It forces the men to feel playful and not at all like predators. I directed the girls to look into the camera. This is very intentional and they do it most of the time; they are in the power position.

I don't think the video is sexist. The lyrics are ridiculous, the guys are silly as fuck. Martel's thoughts have received little attention, but then one flaw in the current debate is an unwillingness to credit female artists with ideas of their own. When Miley Cyrus appeared naked in the Wrecking Ball video, critics assumed director Terry Richardson was calling the shots, yet in the case of Blurred Lines the blame for the video falls on Thicke.

This is just one of the ways in which the battle lines are themselves blurred. Was O'Connor making a valid feminist critique of misogyny in the music industry, or was she indulging in priggish "slut-shaming"? Even more here's that word again problematic is the intersection of gender and race.