No other pop star is willing to tailor their music to feed an audience – even if it’s as bad as ‘Azizam’
Ed Sheeran has just released the song of the summer. “Azizam”, an upbeat, tinny, Persian-inspired “cross cultural collaboration” whose title is Farsi for “my dear” features Middle Eastern instruments and a refugee choir, and returns to his favoured themes of fancying a girl, seizing the moment, meeting her on the dancefloor and not caring about what people say.
With its combination of generic, celebratory sentiments and its suggestion of world music, it is precision-engineered to appeal to the biggest possible global audience and soundtrack the next four months of taxis and weddings. No, it’s not very good, but this is Ed Sheeran: it doesn’t need to be. No pop star on earth better understands how to satisfy the undemanding majority of the music-listening public or how to park his ego in order to deliver it to them.
It’s very easy to be a snob about Sheeran, with his commercialised earworms and billions and billions of streams and dollars. But you’d have to be completely obstinate to deny his talent. He’s written a couple of truly lovely, if overplayed, ballads – “Perfect”, “Thinking Out Loud” – has an ear for melodies that few can match, and is remarkably prolific.
What people really object to when they dismiss Ed Sheeran is what he does with that talent, which is embrace the reality of the industry he is working in, one ruled by algorithms and stream counts, and use the data in front of him to achieve world domination – and to make a lot of money. The teenage troubadour who rose to fame making music in his bedroom and sticking it on YouTube has grown up and sold his soul.
But who needs critical acclaim and respect when you’ve got all that? Sheeran’s most recent albums, 2023’s Subtract and Autumn Variations, produced by Aaron Dessner, were some of the best work of his career in their understated reflection and depth on topics from parenthood to depression to grief. But they didn’t come close to the kind of mindless repeat-plays a slick, nothingy song like “Azizam” is bound for. That Sheeran doesn’t mind churning more of it out again is not purely cynical – it’s actually refreshing.
Sheeran knows how to write for an audience – how to write the exact kind of upbeat song that is just broad enough to evoke a feeling, a vibe, an emotion, or a memory that might not be his, specifically, but will apply to several million other people who will lap it right up.
Listen to the quite glorious “Castle on the Hill”, his best-ever single, which captures the wrenching nostalgia of leaving home. It was written because he needed a song on his album for Radio 2, and it’s a triumph.
Listen to “Shape of You”, an irresistible, percussive banger with a dancehall edge, written because he needed a song on his album for Radio 1, and also a triumph. Listen to “Bad Habits”, “Shivers”, “I Don’t Care” – all lush, synthy, beat-droppy singles about his desire for some woman, the behaviour quirks he finds attractive in her and why nothing will stop them getting together. All of them are hovering around or well beyond two billion streams on Spotify.
Sheeran has always been shameless about targeting a market with his shape-shifting music, which careers from EDM to indie to rap to, now, Persian pop, with an openness more precious artists would never dare. The most egregious example of this was “Galway Girl”, a Gaelic rap ditty that was absurdly derivative upon its first release in 2017.
Critics hated it, and even his record company were reluctant to stick it on the album, saying folk was just not cool enough. But the canny Sheeran knew it would work. “There’s 400 million people in the world that say they’re Irish, even if they’re not Irish. You meet them in America all the time: ‘I’m a quarter Irish and I’m from Donegal.’ And those type of people are going to fucking love it.”
Obviously, he was right. “Galway Girl” has transcended irony. Now, its once-ridiculous fiddles and lazy references to “Grafton Street” just feel like a hallmark of Ed Sheeran’s style of cultural borrowing. If he sees a gap in the market for uptempo singalongs, he’ll have a go at writing something with a genre twist to fill it. Your average passive music listener is easy to please, and as “Azizam” will prove, his formula always works.
We like to think of music as the raw exposure of the heart and soul, as poetically communicating the painful spectrum of human experience. So Ed Sheeran’s approach to songwriting feels like an affront.
But he is a realist, and understands that most people are streaming mind-numbing catchy background noise, and doesn’t mind giving it to them – he thinks harder about the audience than anyone.
Such is Sheeran’s acute consumer awareness, if he didn’t have such a gift for rhymes he’d probably be some kind of ad man, or maybe a Richard Osman type, whose megahit game shows and books about OAPs solving murders display a similar understanding of what most people actually want, rather than what is clever and highbrow and good. In making bad songs, Ed Sheeran is one of few musicians who actually puts the listener first.
