Robin Thicke 'Blurred Lines' Breaks Records Even Among Controversy

After creating controversy with its racy video and provocative lyrics, Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" is breaking records.

According to Thicke's label, Interscope Records, the soulful track has "broken the record for the highest radio audience ever recorded." The tune has reportedly reached 242.65 million listeners to date. A staple on pop and R&B stations, "Blurred Lines" has even appeared on country airwaves, Thicke claimed in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

"Lines," the title track off of Thicke's new album, due out July 30, has also broken a records on the Billboard charts. The song has spent seven weeks at the No. 1 spot, the longest of any tune in 2013. The song passes Macklemore & Ryan Lewis' "Thrift Shop," which had a six-week run back in February. According to Billboard, last year's longest running hit was Maroon 5's "One More Night," which spent nine weeks at number one.

"We felt like maybe it was something special but it was so different," Thicke said of the song during an interview with New York Radio Station 92.3 Now. "We didn't know it would be this big."

Thicke also didn't know how much controversy "Blurred Lines" would stir up. In addition to having a racy video pulled from YouTube, the song made headlines when it was criticized by a U.K. rape charity claimed it was "sexually violent."

"Both the lyrics and the video seem to objectify and degrade women using misogynistic language and imagery that many people would find not only distasteful or offensive but also really quite old fashioned," Katie Russell, a spokeswoman for the group, told The Independent, a British newspaper. "More disturbingly, certain lyrics are explicitly sexually violent and appear to reinforce victim-blaming rape myths. For example...women giving 'mixed signals' through their dress or behavior, saying 'no' when they really mean 'yes' and so on."

Thicke later defended the tune, saying it was about "blurring the lines between men and women and how much we're the same."

"I don't want to be sleazy," he said. "I'm a gentleman."