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| Robin Thicke, right, with one of his Video Characters |
As somebody once said, music is organized ‘noise’. Noise is
sound that irritates people rather than soothes their minds. If one must rank
music on a scale of noise that stretches from zero to hundred, nearly all music
will find a place on the scale. It is just that some will rank, closely, towards
the zero end. Some might even score zero. When I was younger, I used to love
music with a reasonable degree of noise or madness. As I got older however, I
started getting attracted to music towards the zero end of the scale. I
discovered that Thicke’s Blurred Lines gets me enchanted as it falls at the
point on the noise scale that I like. It is the reason why I often jump each
time it comes on Trace Urban television channel.
At one point it was Jazz, then Blues, Gospel, Soul and now Hip
Hop. Hip Hop dominates the popular music landscape across the planet. It has,
however, grown to become extremely complex with people like Wiz Kalifa and his
friends as architects. This current derivative of Hip Hop that finds a place in
the hearts of, mostly, adolescents is said to be financially more rewarding. It
is the reason why it is most favored. However, there are people who love doing
certain things for the sake of it and money will not sway their direction as a
result. The song, Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke, to me, seems to reflect the
mind of a guy that has chosen to defy the rule. It moves far away from Hip Hop barring
the contribution from TI Pharrell.
The lyric is also at variance with what obtains from the
mostly abstract or illogical lyrical tradition of mainstream Hip Hop and
related genres of music. The lyric represents the words of a man who is trying
to persuade a woman to leave her boyfriend because he is a better man than the
boyfriend. The role of rapper, TI Pharrell, is an extension of the same message
albeit in rap format.
Robin Thicke was born 1977, meaning that the genre of Disco was
about to fade away at the time he was becoming conscious of his surroundings.
By the time he became a man, Hip Hop has dominated all the space there was for
any music style. But passion is strong and overcomes just anything. His passion created the space for his
genre of music. To me, Blurred Lines’ tends towards Disco. What I don’t know is
whether it was by design or coincidence. One hears heavy baseline, seemingly
from a bass guitar and some percussion and drumming.
Above all, the music reflects the mind of a guy who wants
something unique, something that he alone has. You feel and see this in the
pace of the song, the feeling it evokes, the video characters and their dress
code. The video appears to have been short in just a single location, obviously
to avoid any complex and potentially rowdy outcome, enabling the man to come
out with exactly what he intended to present to music fans.
Music is the foundation of showbiz. Where it becomes boring,
the opposite happens. Robin Thicke knows this and wouldn’t want to give the
slightest room for such to happen.
Buy How to Become a Music Maestro by Yiro: www.hbmusicmaestro.com
