Is Ed Sheeran really that good?

[NickD]

People are sheep. In general at least. They buy the same clothes, relative to what they can afford, from the same places, listen to the same music, read the same books (most of which aren't even well written - I mean Dan Brown, I ask you!), watch the same TV programmes. They buy the same cars, to match their neighbours with the same massive mortgage, because their friend lives on the same street and drives an A3 TDi too.

I'm quite proud to not fit into all of that.

For what its worth, I know one Ed Sheeran song, and have no idea how the charts work now because I have never used Spotify, and have no intention of doing so.

[Jaguar018]

I don't think the OSG regulars are really the target audience for Ed Sheeran, or top 40 music in general. I remember really loving top 40 when I was in elementary school, and that brief time when "Punk music broke" or whatever 1990s when some of the same shit I liked was part of the cultural zeitgiest. That ended, yet I have never stopped discovering new music, and old music I missed or never knew of.

I'll spare you the relevant Abe Simpson quote.

[mediocreplayer]

Several of the posts veer dangerously close to this now-famous xkcd comic territory


I would not say that most people have bad taste, but rather that they are more easily satisfied, perhaps due to lack-of-exposure of what is possible or simply because they just have a threshold and once the "product" meets that threshold then it is good enough. I would liken this to me with cars. I couldn't give less shits about automobiles in general and I only got a license to buy a car which I never drove once in 4 years. To me, a car is something whose aesthetic value is completely irrelevant once a very basic bar is met. This is obviously very far off from how many or even most people view cars. I am sure that there are many people who have this same ambivalence towards music/books/movies/etc, but like I said, that is not necessarily due to inability to discern good from bad, but rather a lack of interest in doing so.

[shadowplay]

I personally think a lot of folk have no taste, not bad taste but no taste. My sister being a case in point, everything about her shows it to be true, she's obsessed with Take That and goes see them and Robbie Williams a lot, reads Take a Break magazine, goes on holiday to the costa Blanca, watches XFactor, buys all her gear from Primark and the like, her house looks like a million other houses and is filled with stuf she replaces a lot and her car is a common or garden box that she uses like it's disposable. However, she's up to her eyes in credit debt to buy all these things she's barely thought about. For her getting stuff was always easy, get credit, get help, get more credit. My folks were super conventional as well and went dead ordinary all the way, minus the debt.

I do care, I always have, it's what gave me a career, it's part of me, it was clear I wasn't like my folks or sibling from a very young age. I want everything to be nice, I care about music, design and art, i pretty much want everything to be beautiful or special or exquisite in its functionality and I have a great respect, interest, knowledge and enthusiasm for designers and artists (and I also care about them being paid fairly). I think the fascination starts when you realise someone created an object or art and challenged themselves to achieve it. Of course some folk don't care but maybe they just take things for granted (and those who make them) and perhaps don't even value the work that goes into great things (or they could just be so hard pressed but I don't think that's what we are talking about here). Even when I was potless I'd rather have nothing and sit on an old school bench (which was still quite a nice object) than buy a placeholder sofa and I'm happy to wait and wait to get what I want, or even just feel happy the thing exists even if I can't afford it. I've aspirations but unlike my sister who is in debt for a right load of shite, most of which is broken, worn out or forgotten about, I'd rather have nothing than get into debt.

With music it's not a money thing, I'd just have less off it if I didn't have my record budget but time to listen is precious to me so I'm not wasting it with whatever's pushed at me.

Of course next to my kids I don't care about stuff, it's all just stuff even my most beautiful car but if I'm buying something or listening to music or using something, I want the right thing not just 'A' thing.

I've met folk who didn't care or who never had the exposure and some folk soak it up but on the other hand you've got folk like my sis who are almost as anti design and aesthetics as I am pro it.

TLDR no doubt but that's how I feel.

D

[mezcalhead]

I guess his ordinary countenance and Tesco style apparel appealing both to parents who consider the dreaded likes of Coldplay as unacceptably avant garde

that made me lol like Mutley the dog.

Btw Sheeren has 16 tracks on his 'album' which looks like 6 too many to me.

16 too many, perhaps?

[sammynb]

16 too many, perhaps?

QFT

[jorri]

CLearly no-one is that good....for 10 positions in the charts. Irrelevant of his style or talent, I avoid listening to this shit somehow, or maybe i do hear it and its completely unmemorable background noise...but it clearly shows a state of unhealthy monopoly in an economy that isn't functioning. My bet is there are thousands that could replace him, writing 'great hits' for themost part this is true, its about backing and exposure. And the thing is there's monopoly in an industry that should be diverse and enriching, there should be a lot of competition, if like half the people in this thread make out that music is inherently subjective (i.e. there's no way he can be shit even if he obviously is, because someone else likes him right?) if its subjective we need diversity, well unless consumerism has turned us into homogenous automatons-oh wait no that IS it. Anyway, i think subjectivity has limitations and inherent properties that create responsive effects in music, but without getting into that--->no i'm not going to listen to him to find out because there's so much music waiting to be explored? Why does he deserve more time from me?

[NickD]

A big plus 1 in general, I will go without things to buy something I really like. Contrary to how it may look with the nice watch, good shoes, 911 etc I don't have lots of money, but I pay nothing in interest, save for the things I want and save money where I can. Which brings us to this.

I get this point of view:

...My folks were super conventional as well and went dead ordinary all the way, minus the debt.
D

But I will never, ever understand this

...buys all her gear from Primark and the like, her house looks like a million other houses and is filled with stuf she replaces a lot and her car is a common or garden box that she uses like it's disposable. However, she's up to her eyes in credit debt to buy all these things she's barely thought about. For her getting stuff was always easy, get credit, get help, get more credit.

Why spend tons of money on crap? she probably ends up spending as much on buying and throwing away Primark jeans as you or I would on buying and wearing a decent pair. The difference being the decent pair will look good the whole time, the Primark ones will look shite the whole time.

Worse than that is people's attitude towards cars - and I see this a lot. People buy or lease cars that cost them several hundred pounds a month and they have no interest in cars!! That's about as logical as me buying a four grand washing machine.

[UlricvonCatalyst]

Okay, my original question was disingenuous: I never expected anyone on here to argue that Sheeran was in fact good in any objective sense, or even just good of his kind. I just thought the current singles chart situation is indicative of a terminal rot in mainstream music.

Throughout my formative years the singles chart was always clogged up with corporate shills, but there was also an element of meritocracy to it: independent releases from Spiral Scratch to Papua New Guinea would appear in the Top 40 rundown by dint of their 'crossover' appeal.

At some point in the relatively recent past it seemed that if you could just expose people to good art they would embrace that too, alongside whatever else they were passively consuming. Did that die out along with physical sound carriers? Or has the entire mainstream music industry been subverted by Simon Cowell and his ilk, so that they now have an unbreakable monopoly?

To answer my own questions I'd guess that, if anything, streaming should surely result in more diversity rather than less; then again, the charts were always about units sold, not how many times the songs were listened to. The answer to the second part looks like yes, mostly. To expand on Shadowplay's theme a few posts back, maybe the real question now is "Will good art ever be able to compete in the mainstream again?"

[NickD]

To expand on Shadowplay's theme a few posts back, maybe the real question now is "Will good art ever be able to compete in the mainstream again?"

Theoretically, if enough people are exposed to it.

However, I think that what the meandering off topic has shown is that people in general take the path of least resistance in most things, in music, at the moment, that appears to be Ed Sheeran.

And good art probably isn't the path of least resistance.

[shadowplay]

To expand on Shadowplay's theme a few posts back, maybe the real question now is "Will good art ever be able to compete in the mainstream again?"

Theoretically, if enough people are exposed to it.

However, I think that what the meandering off topic has shown is that people in general take the path of least resistance in most things, in music, at the moment, that appears to be Ed Sheeran.

And good art probably isn't the path of least resistance.

I was thinking about this recently when I got an email trying to interest me in a vinyl copy of La La Land, which led me down the rabbithole of wondering how middle aged you'd have to be to want such an item. I reckon you'd probably have to have actually been born middle aged. Some of this is the cross marketing thing and also how we are so post everything that we're back at musicals, which I guess is some sort of admission that we've hit peak rock heritage and we might be going even further back.

I was thinking about the charts of my early teens where you had The Human League get to number one which seemed quite unlikely if you'd been following HL Mrk 1 (and the 'fancy' stereo version of Being Boiled even went top ten after this). I think the last truly great Number one was Computer Love in 1982 but it was really The Model that was the hit and it had an element of catchy novelty that helped it break through. Then IIRC you had Pump Up the Volume (mostly for the bee) and then...nothing IMO. Funnily I remember John Foxx and Fad Gadget having top 20 hits, I thought Cabaret Voltaire had genuine hits , Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft too but again...only in my head...it never actually happened in this reality. I got pretty excited when Japan's Ghosts went top 5 and I thought Nightporter was top ten but no...again I'm remembering another reality.

I've always wanted bands I like to be successful, I don't really care about whether things are popular or obscure, I loved Soft Cell and the Human League just as much when they were in the charts as when they were out in the genre wastelands.

To be honest I think the potato headed likes of Oasis are as responsible for the outbreaks of stupidity as the likes of Simon Cowell and they are surely the root of a dreadful situation where working class has become a synonym for artless and stupid (in contrast to the likes of the Human League) and how so many supposed 'intelligent' bands are all middle class. Line of least resistance in effect.

I guess kids look to Ed Sheeran's positivity (and as Kate Tempest puts it 'Saccharine ballads') and his Castle on the Hill (which I called a song about a mountain earlier). I might too if I was young today, I think the great overt and covert protest and agit prop of the Thatcher era was borne on a wind of belief that you could make a difference and somehow threaten your oppressors but these days everyone knows protest through art is sadly pretty fatuous and that you tend to just preach to your already converted.

That said, to show how out my chart antenna is I genuinely thought that Kate Tempest - Europe is Lost would rise to the top of the charts on swelling wave of word of mouth. It one of the best State of the Nation addresses since Disco Inferno- Summers Last Sound.

In the basement flat, by the garages
Where people dump their mattresses
Esther's in her kitchen, making sandwiches
The slats on her blinds are all wonky and skewed
You can see her from the street before she moves out of view
To kick her boots off tired feet
She wipes her forehead with her wrist
She's just back from a double shift
Esther's a carer, doing nights
Behind her, on the kitchen wall
Is a black and white picture of swallows in flight
Her eyes are sore, her muscles ache
She cracks a beer and swigs it
She holds it to her thirsty lips
And necks it till it's finished
It's 04:18 AM again
Her brain is full from all she's done that day
She knows that she won't sleep a wink
Before the Sun is on its way
She's worried 'bout the world tonight
She's worried all the time
She don't know how she's supposed
To put it from her mind

[Verse 1]
Europe is lost, America lost, London lost
Still we are clamouring victory
All that is meaningless rules
We have learned nothing from history
The people are dead in their lifetimes
Dazed in the shine of the streets
But look how the traffic's still moving
System’s too slick to stop working
Business is good, and there’s bands every night in the pubs
And there’s two for one drinks in the clubs
And we scrubbed up well
Washed off the work and the stress
And now all we want’s some excess
Better yet; a night to remember that we’ll soon forget
All of the blood that was bled for these cities to grow
All of the bodies that fell
The roots that were dug from the earth
So these games could be played
I see it tonight in the stains on my hands
The buildings are screaming
I can't ask for help though, nobody knows me
Hostile, worried, lonely
We move in our packs and these are the rights we were born to
Working and working so we can be all that we want
Then dancing the drudgery off
But even the drugs have got boring
Well, sex is still good when you get it

[Chorus 1]
To sleep, to dream, to keep the dream in reach
To each a dream, don’t weep, don’t scream
Just keep it in, keep sleeping in
What am I gonna do to wake up?

[Verse 2]
I feel the cost of it pushing my body
Like I push my hands into pockets, and softly
I walk and I see it, this is all we deserve
The wrongs of our past have resurfaced
Despite all we did to vanquish the traces
My very language is tainted
With all that we stole to replace it with this
I am quiet, feeling the onset of riot
Riots are tiny though, systems are huge
Traffic keeps moving, proving there’s nothing to do
'Cause it’s big business, baby, and its smile is hideous
Top down violence, a structural viciousness
Your kids are dosed up on medical sedatives
But don’t worry bout that, man, worry 'bout terrorists
The water level's rising! The water level's rising!
The animals, the elephants, the polar bears are dying!
Stop crying, start buying, but what about the oil spill?
Shh, no one likes a party pooping spoil sport
Massacres, massacres, massacres/new shoes
Ghettoised children murdered in broad daylight
By those employed to protect them
Live porn streamed to your pre-teen's bedrooms
Glass ceiling, no headroom
Half a generation live beneath the breadline
Oh, but it's happy hour on the high street
Friday night at last lads, my treat!
All went fine till that kid got glassed in the last bar
Place went nuts, you can ask our Lou
It was madness, road ran red, pure claret
And about them immigrants? I can't stand them
Mostly, I mind my own business
They’re only coming over here to get rich, it’s a sickness
England! England! Patriotism!
And you wonder why kids want to die for religion?
It goes, work all your life for a pittance
Maybe you’ll make it to manager, pray for a raise
Cross the beige days off on your beach babe calendar
The anarchists are desperate for something to smash
Scandalous pictures of fashionable rappers
In glamorous magazines, who’s dating who?
Politico cash in an envelope
Caught sniffing lines off a prostitutes prosthetic tits
Now it's back to the house of lords with slapped wrists
They abduct kids and fuck the heads of dead pigs
But him in a hoodie with a couple of spliffs
Jail him, he’s the criminal
Jail him, he’s the criminal
It's the BoredOfItAll generation
The product of product placement and manipulation
Shoot 'em up, brutal, duty of care
Come on, new shoes, beautiful hair, bullshit!
Saccharine ballads and selfies, and selfies, and selfies
And here’s me outside the palace of ME!
Construct a self and psychosis
Meanwhile the people were dead in their droves
And, no, nobody noticed; well, some of them noticed
You could tell by the emoji they posted

[Chorus 2]
Sleep like a gloved hand covers our eyes
The lights are so nice and bright and let's dream
But some of us are stuck like stones in a slipstream
What am I gonna do to wake up?

[Verse 3]
We are lost, we are lost, we are lost
And still nothing, will stop, nothing pauses
We have ambitions and friendships and courtships to think of
Divorces to drink off the thought of
The money, the money, the oil
The planet is shaking and spoiled
And life is a plaything
A garment to soil
The toil, the toil
I can't see an ending at all
Only the end
How is this something to cherish?
When the tribesmen are dead in their deserts
To make room for alien structures
Develop, develop
And kill what you find if it threatens you
No trace of love in the hunt for the bigger buck
Here in the land where nobody gives a fuck

D

[wingnutkj]

Meanwhile, #sheeranalbumparty is trending on Twitter, for everyone who's into that kind of party.

A listening party. Where you listen to the album. Ed Sheeran's album party. What did you think it meant?

[natthu]

Unfortunately at work we listen to the radio all day. All day. Every day. It's relentless. It just doesn't stop. Does. Not. Stop. Ever.

Out of necessity it's almost always tuned to one of the stations which aims to inoffensively please a slightly older demographic into which I don't quite fit. Basically I'm doomed to unwillingly listen to 80s bogan soft rock for all eternity, which is only occasionally punctuated by a lackluster pop song, quasi-right wing topical banter, something grungy from the 90s, news about loathsome sports, or the current sad offering of a comeback song written by one of the burnt-out-should-have-retired-years-ago bands who provided a good portion of the aforementioned 80s bogan soft rock. I don't particularly like Ed Sheeran, nor am I more than vaguely au fait with his evidently pop-tastic catalogue, but at this point throwing some of his music into the mix would probably come as a welcome, yet lugubrious and pathetic reprieve.

By great Odin's beard, if someone doesn't save me from this 80s rock apocalypse soon I swear I'm going to do bloody murder upon the work radio with acute prejudice, great vengeance and furious anger (and probably a broken screw driver).

What I'm saying is, I envy all you lucky people who possess the luxury of being able to dislike Ed Sheeran. I'm too deep into the crap music vortex for that.

[shadowplay]

Meanwhile, #sheeranalbumparty is trending on Twitter, for everyone who's into that kind of party.

A listening party. Where you listen to the album. Ed Sheeran's album party. What did you think it meant?

My cousin is a Doctor and we once went to a party he hosted and they played Coldplay at a party...Coldplay , which necessitated throwing away Chris Martin in the bin... and being rescued by a party saving mix I made up on the spot on a ipod. Cousin had been at our Hogmanay party and was reciprocating, he described our party as like 'something from ancient Rome', which seems a bit of an over statement until I tell you that when he was at Medical School in Ireland he told my maw that he'd hear all sort of 'immoral' goings on in the student residence and instead of joining in he put his head under the pillow and prayed to Jesus.

Cousin has calmed down a bit these days, has shed the Coldplay and I send him a list of records every month.

We tend to entertain folk and avoid away games but an even worse party experience was going to a house party where they let everyone pick stuff on Spotify and suddenly Mrs S felt so ill we had to leave.

Unfortunately at work we listen to the radio all day. All day. Every day. It's relentless. It just doesn't stop. Does. Not. Stop. Ever.

Condolences, I avoid music radio like I avoid bathing in sewage. I despise working inhouse because the supposed cool kids play such a load of shite, usually related to someone who just died. I'd prefer the sound of silence and if I had folk round my place I'd generally tailor the music to a wider beam but when it's my turn I resort to Symmetric Warfare.

D

[sammynb]

Unfortunately at work we listen to the radio all day. All day. Every day. It's relentless. It just doesn't stop. Does. Not. Stop. Ever.

Out of necessity it's almost always tuned to one of the stations which aims to inoffensively please a slightly older demographic into which I don't quite fit. Basically I'm doomed to unwillingly listen to 80s bogan soft rock for all eternity, which is only occasionally punctuated by a lackluster pop song, quasi-right wing topical banter, something grungy from the 90s, news about loathsome sports, or the current sad offering of a comeback song written by one of the burnt-out-should-have-retired-years-ago bands who provided a good portion of the aforementioned 80s bogan soft rock. I don't particularly like Ed Sheeran, nor am I more than vaguely au fait with his evidently pop-tastic catalogue, but at this point throwing some of his music into the mix would probably come as a welcome, yet lugubrious and pathetic reprieve.

By great Odin's beard, if someone doesn't save me from this 80s rock apocalypse soon I swear I'm going to do bloody murder upon the work radio with acute prejudice, great vengeance and furious anger (and probably a broken screw driver).

What I'm saying is, I envy all you lucky people who possess the luxury of being able to dislike Ed Sheeran. I'm too deep into the crap music vortex for that.

You do live in a city known for its churches and the local brewery thinks supporting a bible society that releases anti marriage equality videos is acceptable behaviour.
Think yourself lucky it's not tuned into Hillsong radio or some other happy clappy soft rock station.

Stand up for yourself man and tune it into Triple J, it's not like they play anything outside of inoffensive these days.