Since the song’s – and particularly, the video’s – release earlier this year, a lot has been said about Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines.” It’s misogynistic. It perpetuates rape culture. It’s vulgar.
In none of the criticisms, though, has anyone mentioned the most obvious crime “Blurred Lines” commits against humanity: terrible, terrible rhymes. One of the more buzzed-about lines in the number is the vague, chuckle-infused, “What rhymes with hug me?” The complete non-rhyme implied in this moment (Mr. Thicke is not referring to “rugby,” my friends), though, is not the only instance in the number where Thicke does a bit of blurring of his rhymes.
For those of you who may have forgotten – I’m lookin’ at you, pop stars – a “rhyme” is defined in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary as the “correspondence in terminal sounds of units of composition or utterance.” In other words, a pair of lines of verse only counts as rhyming if the two end sounds actually match each other.
The popular songs of this summer have had some serious trouble adhering to this literally elementary standard. Thicke, for instance, outright refers to a rhyme between “hug” and an unpleasant term that, in real life, rhymes with “duck.” Tell me, average first grader: do “hug” and “duck” rhyme? What say ye to “say” and “page,” or “plastic” and “blasted,” or my personal favorite Robin Thicke blurred rhyme, “domesticate you” and “nature”?
Unless you have a serious mumbling problem, these words do not rhyme.
Thicke, however, is far from alone in this summer’s blurred rhymes brigade. Avril Lavigne’s latest, “Here’s to Never Growing Up,” throws me for a rhyming loop every time I hear it. With line-terminating words “love,” “lungs,” “drunk,” and “up,” the chorus of this song has so muddled the meaning of rhyme that the single may as well be called, “Here’s to Never Passing Grade School.”
At the same time, though, relative youngsters from the pop scene are creating rhyme innovations left and right. Ke$ha’s spring party anthem, “C’Mon,” rhymes “high schooler” with “wine cooler,” “tiger” with “Budweiser,” and “Kosher” with “fo’ sure.” The rhymes in this song are so brilliant, I literally almost fell out of my London city bus seat in shock the first time I heard it. Robin Thicke, are you really allowing a girl with a dollar sign in her name to out-linguist you? In her words, come on.
Meanwhile, onetime Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus has showed such a passion for rhyme this summer that she has abandoned all other rules of grammar. In her drawly but infectious “We Can’t Stop,” she completely turns her back on normal syntax for the sole purpose of rhyming “we” with “nobody.” “We run things, things don’t run we” may be one of the dumbest sentences in the history of the English language, but at least it rhymes with the line that comes after it.
Say what you want about the problems inherent in this summer’s pop playlist. I know what I hate, and it is blurred rhymes. Ke$ha and Miley, keep on keepin’ on with your rhyming selves. And Robin Thicke? Maybe use some of the royalties your song will be reeling in from after-hours pay-per-view TV programming to buy yourself a nice dictionary. What, you don’t like work?