Blurred Lines Boycott: Why I’m Voting Yes

Here’s a fact for you: the referendum on whether or not to stop playing Blurred Lines on Union premises takes places this week. Here’s another fact, and this one may shock you: there are more songs that clubs don’t play than songs they do.

Do you really feel your human rights are being breached every time the LCR doesn’t play The Safety Dance? Because that’s how some people are reacting to the prospect of not hearing a particular song at A-List LCR nights.

Clubs stop playing songs all the time, as anybody who wept with joy when Gangnam Style finally faded from popularity will surely know. Sometimes the song has been overplayed, sometimes it just isn’t popular anymore and sometimes it’s because there are some people who really, really don’t want to hear it. 

It’s not that some people don’t like Blurred Lines, it’s that they say its undeniably weird vibe makes them feel genuinely uncomfortable. And who are we to tell them otherwise? Whether you agree with them about the actual song or not is, to be honest, irrelevant.

Is your need to hear a specific song on nights out really so great that some people should be made to listen to something that upsets them? Unless you’re an obsessive Robin Thicke superfan (there must be one in the world, surely), I highly doubt it. Personally, I regularly force people to listen to songs they really don’t want to, just to protect their freedom.

Or perhaps this has little to do with the song at all. It seems most of the negativity towards this motion has come not from any opinion on the matter at hand, but from dissatisfaction with the Union. The Union have done an undeniably shoddy job of organising this referendum, but how you get from there to automatically voting ‘No’ is still a mystery to me. Don’t hijack an issue and use it as an excuse to kick the Union. Wait until you’ve voted, then kick them. That seems fair enough.

We’re talking about what gets played in the LCR and what gets sold in The Shop, not the suppression of free thought; let’s get some perspective here. At any rate, the song is already passing out of the public eye, so a boycott won’t really make any noticeable difference to your day to day experience. What it will do is send a message that people actually care about how others feel while they’re at University. Voting ‘Yes’ is not about ‘your right’ to listen to anything, it’s just about being nice. It’s as simple as that.