![]() ![]() When he announced he was taking a hiatus at the end of 2019, the public rejoiced en masse, which is a far cry from the muted acclaim that greeted him at the start of the decade. Unfortunately, he doubled down in this direction, releasing an ill-advised collaborations album full of star-studded but mismatched pairings that further wore out the public and damaged his critical reputation. The thought that he could pull off a sex jam, completely unironically, would be hilarious if it weren’t also responsible for some of the worst pop songs of the 2010s. And the flaws in that approach became very clear, very quickly, because the lack of pop star presence innate to Ed Sheeran led every song he touched to sound like pale, cheap, watered-down imitations of better songs. The stuff he began releasing from 2017 onward wasn’t the idiosyncratic guitar-adjacent pop he was known for it was just regular old pop music, with no irony or novelty attached. I don’t know what happened, but sometime in those three years, probably as a result of his increased studio work writing and producing for pop stars, Ed Sheeran began to buy his own hype. Considering how boring the musical landscape of 2014 was, Ed was a welcome presence.Įd Sheeran clearly did not come to the same conclusion. He didn’t have the natural hype factor or glam edge or charisma that other pop stars do, he just worked with what he had and drew on the things that made him unique and different in order to stand out, and the result was one of the most interesting celebrities we’d had in a while. It’s the fact that he made it in spite of his limitations that made his rise interesting. But let’s be clear–what made that initial pop breakout work so well was not that Ed Sheeran was a born pop star, but because he wasn’t a born pop star. And he was always treading on rocky ground from the beginning. Imagine.Īll of those things led to me forming a grudging respect for Sheeran, even as his actual musical output continued to tread very unevenly. In a world where tabloid-chasing douchebags like John Mayer can drain themselves of all credibility trying to chase that elusive pop star swagger, Ed Sheeran managed to weave himself in a far more glamorous world than his dorkwad ginger self would normally allow, to the point that he was being romantically connected to stars like Ellie Goulding and Taylor Swift early on. And he played the pop star role better than anyone expected from those of his ilk. So I guess it was the novelty factor that really kept me interested in him, bolstered by the fact that that album, x, is actually quite good, possibly his best album. Unlike Mraz, who clearly didn’t understand the music he was taking inspiration from, Ed Sheeran knew that hard partying at strip clubs and having meaningless sex is what you rap about. Jason Mraz tried desperately to mold himself in Jamiroquai’s image for years, only to end up embarrassing himself because his intricate rhymes and dexterous flow amounted to basically nothing in terms of actual meaning, because no one could make sense of what he was actually saying. And to be clear, he’s not the first Caucasian dork with a guitar to try and pull this off. ![]() I noticed that he was more lyrically creative and musically diverse, and the few times he tried to experiment with afrobeat rhythms and sampling and guitar loop feedback, he actually somewhat managed to pull it off.īut the real surprise was when he went full-on pop in 2014, releasing the back-to-back ‘ Sing’ and ‘ Don’t’, two songs which see him convincingly pull off both strip-club rap and RnB. ![]() I think I may have been a lot more defensive of Ed back when he was first beginning to break through, circa 2012, because I always did sense something in him that set him apart from his fellow white guy with acoustic guitar contemporaries. ![]() And I’m not gonna lie, the past few years have led me to reconsider a lot of my previous Ed Sheeran opinions, so I may need to take you on a trip back in order to really recontextualize my thoughts on our ginger friend here. Yeah, because I feel like maybe I kinda don’t? It’s been at least four years since the last time Ed Sheeran released what can reasonably be called a good song, and at this point I worry he might be past the point of no return, because the Ed Sheeran story is hitting some familiar beats. Y’all remember when I said I liked Ed Sheeran? “Ain’t got no name, ain’t got no fancy education / But I can see right through / A powdered face on a painted fool“ ![]()
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