Musician Pharrell Williams recently expressed regret over his 2013 “rapey” hit song “Blurred Lines,” which he collaborated on with singer Robin Thicke and rapper T.I.
Sitting down with GQ for an interview published on Monday, the singer claimed he didn’t understand that the song’s lyrics could have an adverse affect on women until well after the song took off. According to the 46-year-old, we have a “chauvinist culture in our country.”
While discussing the “new conversation” surrounding masculinity, Williams explained that things that used to be kosher in society “would never fly today,” such as “[a]dvertisements that objectify women,” and “song content” – including some of his own.
“Some of my old songs, I would never write or sing today,” he said. “I get embarrassed by some of that stuff. It just took a lot of time and growth to get to that place.”
“I think ‘Blurred Lines’ opened me up,” Williams said. At first, the artist explained, he didn’t see the issue with the song due to how much women seemed to enjoy the hit.
“I didn’t get it at first. 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,” the musician explained. “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. And I know you want it – women sing those kinds of lyrics all the time. So it’s like, What’s rapey about that?”
“And then I realized that there are men who use that same language when taking advantage of a woman, and it doesn’t matter that that’s not my behavior,” he continued. “Or the way I think about things. It just matters how it affects women. And I was like, Got it. I get it. Cool. My mind opened up to what was actually being said in the song and how it could make someone feel. Even though it wasn’t the majority, it didn’t matter. I cared what they were feeling too.”
“I realized that we live in a chauvinist culture in our country,” Williams told the magazine. “Hadn’t realized that. Didn’t realize that some of my songs catered to that. So that blew my mind.”
Williams also spoke of masculinity, which he claimed “is the essence of you that understands and respects that which isn’t masculine.”
“If you ask me,” he said, “when we talk about masculinity, it’s also very racial, this conversation. Because the dominant force on this planet right now is the older straight white male. And there’s a particular portion of them that senses a tanning effect. They sense a feminizing effect. They sense a nonbinary effect when it comes to gender.”
One song Williams certainly doesn’t regret is “Happy.”
“And then here comes ‘Happy,’ a record that I didn’t write for myself, that I ended up being on, that made people feel happy,” he said, noting that the song “made me cry. It literally made me cry. Like, I was on the Oprah show for my birthday, and she showed me a video of people around the world singing that song, and that s*** f***ed me up. Bad. I was never the same. So I don’t beat on my chest. I haven’t been the same since any of that music.”
No comments:
Post a Comment