Yeah, it’s kinda weird how you took that out of context and said it should “stand on its own”. From GQ:
He’s talking about how the video was intentionally over the top in every way because it was fun to break loose and do something ridiculous like that. His comment isn’t even explicitly about the song (much less the lyrics), it’s about the music video and having topless models cavorting with lambs, a stuffed dog, a giant syringe, etc. Nothing in his comment comes close to implying the crux of the OP though, whether the song is condoning rape.
It’s simply a catchy song with extremely mild ambiguous innuendo with an edgy controversial video to push conversation back onto the song, which would otherwise be completely without conversation without the video.
I don’t see a controversy beyond the producers grinning at the concerned-public fish they’ve hooked. See the repetition of song vs video publicity with respect to Devo, “Whip It”, 1981
Now I’m going to go listen to Brown Sugar, because it makes me dance so good.
Sex negative? He’s telling her that she doesn’t have to conform to what society says good girls should be. If she wants to have passionate, hair pulling, ass slapping sex, go ahead.
Wow! All these years a good portion of songs I’ve enjoyed are rape songs! Me, I always called them begging songs. Men begging the women of their desires to have sex with them. Little did I know that Marvin Gaye, Extreme, Sam Cooke — all them guys were really singing about raping women.
Thanks super feminists for telling me how rapey music is.
Wait a second…this song has a point? I thought it was just trying to hypnotize me into having a vocabularly consisting of merely "Hey Hey Hey Hey’ “Blurred lines”.
There was more too it?
I mean, actually…is there? It’s a terrible pop song, not near worth even thinking about. That’s how it reads and how it sounds.
I had to go read the lyrics to get a true impression of it. The song is innocent of being sexist, but guilty of being terrible.
So when a bully tells a smaller kid to give up his lunch money, if he gives up without arguing or fighting, it isn’t theft?
See, this is an old, old issue. She didn’t say no, so it must have been ok. She didn’t scream or fight so it must have been ok. The idea that women must resist in just the right way, no matter the circumstances or what might happen to her if she does.
Nah, it’s a fantastic song, as long as you ignore the dumb lyrics (like most pop songs). But, man, whenever I hear it, it makes me wanna get up and dance, and I’m not a get up and dance kinda guy, so it’s doing something right.
I don’t think he’s talking about some absent husband or boyfriend. I think the guy he’s talking about is some other guy in the club. He tried to talk up the woman and she shot him down. So now the singer is saying “Hey, I’m better than that guy.”
“Hey baby, you’re the hottest bitch in this place, let me guess, you’re a good girl who wants to get nasty”.
Eh, crass and juvenile, but “rapey”? Hmm… not*** as long as the other party in the story is playing the same game***, which seemed to me to be the song’s presumption. Now, IRL you take a risk presuming that, but a lot of pop/rap lyrics do tend to take place in the Universe of Stupid (or the Universe of Porn) rather than ours.
I’ll take the author’s word at it that they were just up to doing a deliberately stupid/tasteless song (considering it was what Robin was singing while grinding groins with Miley, I suppose mission accomplished, Good Taste succesfully avoided). It may have blurred “that fine line between stupid and clever” but the bottom line was only blurry because of how fast the money poured in. It’s a catchy trashy track.
So the song character is engaging in PUA “game”…? I’ll buy that. I suppose douchey’s somewhat better than rapey.