In 2013, the song “Blurred Lines” spent almost two months on top of the Billboard Hot 100, earning Robin Thicke, Pharrell Williams, and TI their biggest hit. The song is known for its unrated music video, which featured the three men accompanied by topless models, one of whom is Emily Ratajkowski, whose appearance in the video made her one of the world’s most famous supermodels. For Thicke, who had previously been just a moderately successful songwriter for Usher, Christina Aguilera, and Will Smith, with a performing career highlight of being featured on tracks for Lil Wayne, “Blurred Lines” was his breakout. Ratajkowski was the secret ingredient: “Blurred Lines” accumulated 14.8 million listens right after Billboard started counting streams from YouTube toward its calculations for its charts.

By the end of the 2010s, Billboard listed it as one of the defining songs of the decade. But once it became popular, listeners felt that the song was inflicted on them. A month after its release on March 29, 2013, a blog called Feminist in LA labeled it “Robin Thicke’s rape song.” Eventually, many commentators agreed with that harsh reaction. Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield called it “the worst song of this or any other year,” while journalists described the lyrics as sleazy or misogynistic, interpreted as condoning sexual assault, beginning with its hook, “I know you want it.“ Then, at the 2013 VMAs, Thicke made everything worse with a surreal and cringeworthy performance of the song, dancing in a pinstripe suit with a scantily clad Miley Cyrus in front of a skeeved-out crowd of thousands in the theater and millions at home. Suddenly, a hit had become a moral abomination, not just a horrible piece of music.