Every piece you read about Ed Sheeran will make sure to hit two key branding points. 1) He is hugely successful. Like, multiplatinum in an era where people don't go multiplatinum any more successful. 2) He is a very nice guy.
Around the time of the release of his second album, X, Parade ran a profile of the Taylor Swift BFF and recent Best New Artist Grammy nominee in which, by the second paragraph, the affable songwriter takes a selfie with a starstruck teenage fan, and then mentions that he once wrote a hit song about a woman he met at a homeless shelter. What a mensch, right?
The piece goes on to mention his many famous pals (Courtney Cox, Usher) and how unfazed he is by all his success. It does not compare him to Rupert Grint cosplaying Dashboard Confessional, which seems like a lost opportunity.
We get to learn about the time last year when, after a Grammy party, Sheeran and his bros trashed a hotel room. The next morning, "he recalls with a sheepish grin, 'I literally de-trashed my room and put it back to normal.'" Sheeran, the piece goes on to assert, "is all too aware that, if he misbehaves or insults someone, the news could easily make TMZ or Twitter—and result in lost record sales. 'It’s the time of being polite,' he says."
The Ed Sheeran Nice Guy Brand promises the consumer that the lovelorn troubadour is sensitive, nerdy (the above profile took place at a toy store), and won't break your heart like those other boys. But one listen to X reveals that he's not as far away from the macho types that unapologetically trash hotel rooms as he'd like you to think.
Take, for example, the very first lines on X, from the lightly plucked acoustic "One":
"Tell me that you'll turn down the man
Who asks for your hand
Cause you're waiting for me
And I know, you're gonna be away a while
But I've got no plans at all to leave
And would you take away my hopes and dreams?
Just stay with me"
The feminist action website Shakesville defines "Nice Guy™", please note the quote marks and TradeMark symbol, as "a guy who tells you, in a bitter, resentful tone, that women don't date 'nice guys' they only date 'bad boys,' and because he's 'too nice,' women only view him as a friend."
The archetypical Nice Guy Song tends to go something like this: I am a wonderful, sensitive snowflake, noble and pure, but you do not see this, as you have been tricked by this shallow, shallow world and by what's his name with the pecs. I am nice and special, and I deserve to have you, and by have you I mean have glorious, glorious sex with you, because, again, I am nice and special, and one day you will see what a dumb bitch you are being, and until then I'll be waiting right here. Patiently. Oh, so patiently.
Or, as Mr. Sheeran raps on his song "The Man", and yes I said raps:
"Now I don't wanna hate you
Just wish you'd never gone for the man
And waited two weeks at least
Before you let him take you
I stayed true, I kind of knew
You liked the dude from private school."
Then he goes on to say:
"But fuck it
I won't be changing the subject; I love it
I'll make your little secret public
It's nothing, I'm just disgusted with the skeletons
You sleep with in your closet."
I know, but let's move on to the end and not focus on that tortured metaphor. He then goes on to namedrop a Bon Iver song, promises that he's more celibate than a monastery for her (though it's unclear if this was ever requested), and boasts:
"Cause I still love you and I need you by my side
The irony is if my career and music didn't exist
In six years, yeah, you'd probably be my wife with a kid."
Someone got told.
Of course, nice guys can only deal with so much rejection before they start acting like a regular old guy, and then we end up with something like Ed's worldwide smash single "Don't", the chorus of which is "Don't fuck with my love/ That heart is so cold." I could quote the song further, but would you really want me to?
While the agitated crusaders for ethical reform in video game journalism dominated most of this year's discussion, re: unfettered male privilege run amok, the Nice Guys™ made a nice showing for themselves this past year, but then again, they always do.
It was there in Nico & Vinz' international hit "Am I Wrong" (Sample lyric: "So am I wrong/ For thinking that we could be something for real?/ Now am I wrong/ For trying to reach the things that I can't see?"), it was there in Sam Smith's "Like I Can" ("Why are you looking down all the wrong roads?/ When mine is the heart and the salt of the soul") and it was there in "W.D.Y.W.F.M" ("What Do You Want From Me") by the Neighbourhood, aka proof that every generation gets the Third Eye Blind that it deserves. I'd go into the lyrics, but you saw the title. I'm sure you get it.
If we'd done this a few years ago, I think I'd have even more popular examples to work with, but recently it seems that the pop audience has begun to lose patience with male performers. No fucking wonder.
I don't like any of the songs I mentioned above. And sure, it's fair play to say "well, yeah, of course you don't, you have strong opinions on what should have been on Pitchfork's Year End List," but pop music is supposed to reroute your brain and make you like it even when you don't want to like it. This is a feat that Sheeran's songwriting, which sounds like an unholy alliance between Simply Red and G. Love and Special Sauce (but, like, really white) was unable to achieve.
But this begs the question, could I possibly like music told from the morally toxic nice guy viewpoint if the songs were better? Jesus, of course I could. And I bet you could as well.
It's worth pointing out, first and foremost, that only really pious assholes and aging Bob Dylan fans listen to music purely for moral gratification and to have their world view ratified. It's an uncomfortable but inarguable fact that the listening public is willing to embrace some deeply dubious attitudes when they're delivered with enough panache, and from Axl Rose to Mick Jagger to Future, we love ourselves some magnificent bastards, even if, in the art anyway, they make it clear that they're also just bastards-bastards. How else can you explain that, 18 years after their last great album, many people you know were willing to give that new Weezer album a shot?
But there's more to it than the old "it just sounds good, man, don't overthink it" bon mot that we repeated in the '90s every time Death Row released another album. There is value to lyric writing that reveals some ugly shit, and not just because it provides a handy "do not date a person that does this" guide. Just because you're writing about nice guys doesn't always mean you like nice guys, and just because you're writing about yourself doesn't mean you like yourself.
Sometimes being a nice guy is a phase you have to go through before you see how much of a shithead you're being. Though he didn't write the song, Lou Barlow grabbed the Nice Guy™ crown for the rest of eternity when he took a then rare vocal turn on another song called "Don't", the last song on Dinosaur Jr.'s seminal album Bug. The lyrics to this song are, famously, "why don't you like me," repeated ad nauseam, and they probably aren't even about a lady (that band had issues back then), but artists only have a certain amount of say about how their work gets to be interpreted.
After that album Barlow was, more or less, kicked out of Dinosaur Jr., and went on to explore the nice guy archetype in depth, adding real pathos to the patheticness, struggling to be less passive aggressive, failing, then trying again, or as he said in Sebadoh's "Willing to Wait", "I'm willing to wait my turn to be with you/ But I still have a lot to learn about me." Though Rivers Cuomo introduced himself to world by describing, in detail, how a girl should act if she wants to date him and then threw himself an epic pity party when that didn't work out, and on the last truly great song he'll ever release, conceded, "I guess you're as real as me/ Maybe I can live with that," which, contextually, was pretty generous of him. Then there was a metric fuckton of backsliding from him later, but that's for a different essay.
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. If only they would see. Along with an aggressive level of entitlement, this is what separates a Nice Guy™ song from a good old fashioned unrequited love ballad. When you're asking someone to take a chance on you, you're acknowledging that they have a right to choose.
And I say that as a person who, in another life, was responsible for no small amount of very public, very performative sighing. There was a time I would use the term friend zone with some regularity, and I might have had a chip on my shoulder about that. I might have, and I'm not confirming this, I'm just saying that I might have done this, wondered aloud why no one understood me. Turns out, a lot people understood quite well that self-pity isn't as charismatic as one might think. It is embarrassing to see yourself diagnosed in an entry on Tiger Beatdown, but growing the fuck up is tough on all of us. At least I didn't rap about my feelings.
As much of us reformed Nice Guys™ learn, relationships aren't a game you win, and they only work when you're willing to accept a person as they are, in all their complex mess, and you're willing to offer yourself up exactly as you are, no matter how broken, and let them make the call.
One of the scariest things everyone one day realizes is there's just no life hack that lets you bypass this step, and that's why some boys would rather complain that no one is playing the game fair. Getting called out on their entitlement is something a lot of dudes don't want to hear, but someone needs to tell them. It's the nice thing to do.