In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
Picture this: Ed Sheeran is wearing sunglasses indoors, in winter, at nighttime.He’s rocking five gold chains and a skintight shiny-silver suit.
He walks into every room like “I am the baddest motherfucker in here, and you are all lucky to be in my presence.” If you witnessed Ed Sheeran doing all of this with your own two eyes, you’d still be like, “Oh, I get it.Ed Sheeran is making a sly, self-deprecating comment about pop-star excesses.” This is the Ed Sheeran thing.
He is pop’s great everyman, the global supernova who looks like he slept in too late and didn’t have time to comb his hair before showing up to his graphic-design job.Can you imagine a big star who’s less threatening than Ed Sheeran? He’s your friend’s little brother who always wants to hang out with you guys but who usually doesn’t get the invitation.
He’s the guy in the next dorm room over who takes his acoustic guitar everywhere.He’s someone who makes polite conversation with you in the supermarket line and who you never think about again for the rest of your life.
In a world full of larger-than-life pop stars, Ed Sheeran went in the other direction.He’s smaller than life, and that has made him bigger than just about all of his competition.
His nice-guy busker routine has been filling stadiums for more than a decade.It’s unfathomable.
To put it another way: Sex was never a big part of the Ed Sheeran elevator pitch.He’s not unhandsome, but most pop stars exude sex in one way or another, and that’s not him.
He could always sing love songs, but love songs and sex songs are generally not the same thing.And yet Ed Sheeran made the biggest hit of his life, one of the bigges...