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Ed Sheeran Deserves More Credit for Being a One-of-a-Kind Songwriter: Critic’s Take

Ed Sheeran deserves more credit for his songwriting prowess. Here's a critic's take on Billboard's No. 24 Greatest Pop Star of the 21st Century.

In 2011, The Guardian ’s Peter Robinson literally made the English singer-songwriter the face of “The New Boring,” calling his debut album+ “a 12-bore s–tgun” and likening him to “a combination of every friend-of-a-friend’s band whose pub gig you have ever witnessed.” Six years later, Pitchfork ’s Laura Snapes described Sheeran as “trite,” “bland” and “unimaginative,” all within the sub-headline of a review about his third album ÷(it scored a 2.8). For the duration of his career, the musician has been especially critiqued for his approach to genre, cherry-picking features of hip-hop, R&B and rock and distilling them into compressed, radio-friendly pop earworms which inevitably become lodged for years at a time on the charts and on grocery store speakers — writer Rachel Aroesti recently described the end result as a “sludgy, vague, inoffensive post-genre sound that has served to homogenise music in general.” And at a time where any male artist with his tastes would’ve earned far more cool points by positioning himself as an aloof rock star in the vein of Oasis or Arctic Monkeys, he instead fully, authentically embraced the world of pop and its leaders, teaming up with Taylor Swift on “Everything Has Changed” in 2013 and penning hits for Biebs and 1D’s (2012’s “Little Things” and 2015’s “Love Yourself,” respectively.)

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