He can obviously write a tune (once you’ve heard that little calypso melody from Shape of You once you’re never going to forget it), the stuff he does with a delay pedal is clever if not original and nice though it would be to chalk his success up to canny marketing and craven opportunism he’s clearly where he is due to talent first and foremost.
That said I find him and the persona he’s built for himself in his music and in public to be deeply, deeply sinister. His musical message seems alternate between “of course you chose him, I am but a poor boy with a guitar and a song in his heart” and “now I’m really successful I bet you wish you hadn’t rejected me”. Neither is a new attitude in music but he’s made an absolute fortune slathering on a nice guy veneer and repackaging some deeply creepy shit for a new generation. Other people have written this same stuff far more succinctly and eloquently than I ever could but once you’ve heard it you realise how pervasive this attitude is through his music.
In the nice guy world, the object of affection, usually a woman, but sometimes, as in hit songs by Paramore or Taylor Swift, a dude, isn’t really a person. They’re a prize that the narrator thinks they’ve already won for being such a swell person and not like the rest of the jerks.
He also wrote the lyric “up and coming like I’m fucking in an elevator”, which even without the stuff above would stick him squarely on the train to onesville. Shit music, creepy little man. 1/5.
