Mar 30 - We Need To Talk About Ed Sheeran
By Stefano Blanca Sciacaluga
Remember that film We Need to Talk About Kevin? That one with Thom Yorke (Tilda Swindon) and that dude John C. Reilly that really reminds me of the word BEEF. Well, I watched it and can't remember anything about it, I think the Kevin dude was a little off or something.
Anyway, the time has come to speak about Ed Sheeran. So, I know most of you are enjoying the way more invasive than when U2 stuck their album on every iPhone marketing scheme that he's got going on, but I also know some of you are definitely thinking, where did this guy come from?
I'm a big fan of music, and I like to think my music taste is so varied that I could never be considered a music snob, but it seems like we are living a total nightmare. Just a couple of years ago this Ed Sheeran guy was just a regular singer songwriter with ginger hair, a weird face and a tiny guitar, and all of a sudden he's a singer songwriter with ginger hair, a weird face, a tiny guitar and an album that was given a 2.8 rating by Pitchfork* (who know a thing or two about music) but yet somehow has managed to end up completely taking over the top ten in the charts of a number of countries; even Italy, where it's not even the kind of voice they're into.
Now, I'm no genius, I know how these things work and it's fairly simple. Ed Sheeran has a lot of money, right? And he would have more if everybody who used that stupid song from last year in their wedding actually paid him for the rights to play it. But that's besides the point. Ed Sheeran has a lot of money, he might look like a uni refresher but if he wanted to he could probably dress in a suit made of gold and throw it away at the end of every day. So it's easy to see what's happened here, he's written a bunch of songs, called up his marketing team and said, "give me the most expensive package you have", "are you sure?", "yes, we eatin' lobstah tonight". And so he's made a huge investment on marketing and is one thousand percent reaping the rewards. I'm sure it was a no-brainer, he couldn't have been risking much, and had it all gone wrong he would have still made some cash moneys anyway.
But from there, from planning to spam everybody to actually successfully breaking chart records probably hasn't been all that easy. Or has it? A few weeks ago I was down at O'Reilly's and over the space of a couple of hours I probably heard his whole album three or four times. Now I realise he did have (or has) nine songs in the top ten but the fact that there was nothing in between, some Clean Bandit or whatever was that extra spot in the top ten, tells me that O'Reilly's were straight up playing the entire record back to back. As if I wasn't already tired of hearing that Shape of You number in the office; which if I must admit sounds an awful like another tune they play in my office, the name of which I don't know. Now, being an avid music fan, I can't ignore these things, as much as I'd like to, so I (somewhere along the line) started listening in to the music and the lyrics, and to be completely honest it's just not worth the hype. And on top of it it's a bit of a Barry White situation. I've been told by people how they thought Barry White was this sexy man judging by the voice and then once they saw him he was a bit Barry Shite. If we were still in MTV's golden age of music videos and your TV set happened to me on mute you wouldn't even give Ed Sheeran a chance.
So why does everybody like him so much? Do teenage girls like him and so teenage boys "like" him? But how do explain people my age, in their late 20s, losing their minds over this guy? What kind of marketing stunt is this and why can't other better musicians pull it off? And why don't O'Reilly's have a Spotify account? I even offered to make them playlists. Why, Ed Sheeran?
The musician in me is shocked, kinda angry and feeling a little weird about this, the marketing guy in me is in awe and my voice of reason is trying to make sense of it all. But what's worse of all is that he seems like a really, really nice guy, and I kind of like him and wish he was my mate. It's cheesy to say, but he's got my opinions all divided.
*http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22960-divide/
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