Why Thicke’s fans no longer ‘want it’
“I KNOW you want it,” Robin Thicke controversially crooned on his inescapable 2013 hit, ‘Blurred Lines’.
Actually, Robin, we don’t want ‘it’ after all. Thicke’s latest album, Paula, released just a year after ‘Blurred Lines’ conquered the world and ushered the horrific term ‘rapey’ into public discourse, has flopped, shifting less than 500 copies in the UK and a pathetic 54 in Australia, which was previously among the Californian’s biggest markets.
How could the artist responsible for one of the defining songs of last summer go from tall-haired conqueror to gasping also-ran so quickly?
The thinning of Thicke’s fanbase is partly due to the new album’s icky subject matter: Paula is a tremendously drippy valentine to the artist’s ex-wife (yes, named Paula), from whom Thicke separated last February after nine years of marriage.
Wearing your heart on your sleeve is no crime. Break-up albums have a proud tradition and, listening to the record, it’s clear Thicke is hurting. More problematic is that Thicke seems to believe the LP might win his wife back.
Rather than poking through the ashes of a failed relationship, Thicke’s trying to re-light a fire — so the album is uncomfortably passive-aggressive (Paula has no opportunity to set forward her side of the story). Voyeurism has its place in pop. And yet, Thicke’s over-sharing goes too far and is deeply off-putting.
However, that’s surely only part of the reason Paula has stiffed so epically.
If we required more Thicke in our lives, we’d get past the toe-curling lyrics.
The meltdown in Thicke’s sales suggests there is little ongoing appetite for his oily dance-pop and shirt-unbuttoned cheesiness. ‘Blurred Lines’ was the definitive articulation of Thicke’s world view. Evidently, audiences don’t need to hear him repeat the point ad nauseam.
To start talking about Thicke as a one-hit novelty would be premature.
Terrifyingly, he may have another ‘Blurred Lines’ up his sleeve (or, more probably, stuffed down his trousers).
But Paula belongs to that exclusive club of disastrous follow-up records — albums that so fundamentally unravel an artist’s earlier accomplishments, it’s only slightly hyperbolic to describe them as ‘career-killing’.
Thicke may be comforted to know he’s in respectable company. From Oasis to Guns’n’Roses and Mariah Carey, many artists fling a spanner in their prospects.
Sometimes, it’s down to indolence and indifference — for instance, Oasis’s Be Here Now was, by their own admission, recorded in a blizzard of cocaine. Background tensions can creep into the studio: Guns ’n’ Roses’s disastrous covers project, The Spaghetti Incident, was recorded as the group was falling apart, and burnout contributed to Mariah Carey’s 2001 disaster, Glitter.
Thicke is different. The artists listed above were well-established when the wheels started to come off.
They wobbled, but stayed on the track. Thicke isn’t yet assured of his position in the pop-star pantheon — though, a decade into his career, it isn’t wildly inaccurate to think of Paula as the stereotypical troubled second LP (it is his seventh record, but so far as the majority of his audience is concerned he’s a newcomer).
Is it all over for him? If he’s not careful, that might be the case. After all, it has been hinted, for a while, that his career could be a flash in the pan.
When Thicke sang in Dublin several months ago, as support for Maroon 5, the audience’s disinterest — they were not engaged enough to be described as ambivalent — was striking.
Obviously, there was some cheering and whooping when he closed out his short performance with ‘Blurred Lines’ (not as much as you might expect). Otherwise, Thicke had the air of a slightly annoying party crasher — someone whose initial charisma was revealed to be a harbinger of an unbecoming neediness.
He wanted our love a lot more than we were prepared to give it. Now, he has discovered just how fickle his previously adoring public can be.
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