Tag: Ed Sheeran

Sheer(an) stupidity

I have very little occasion to talk about Ed Sheeran, but since his current tour has fallen apart in kind of spectacular fashion, well, I’ve got one now. This began a couple of days ago when Macklemore, one of his opening acts, said bad words on stage:

Macklemore has been dropped from the remainder of the US leg of Ed Sheeran’s Loop tour, after the American rapper drew headlines for saying “free Palestine” on stage at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.
In a brief speech between songs on 4 September, the Grammy-winning artist told the audience he wanted the people of Gaza and “the occupied West Bank” to know “we have not forgotten about them”, prompting a petition from the Israeli American Council demanding his removal from the tour. […]
Macklemore, long an outspoken supporter of the rights of Palestinians and those in Gaza, delivered the remarks at his first appearance on the Loop tour on 4 September. “A big part of the reason why I wanted to do this tour in the first place is so I could stand up in stadiums like this and say two words that are very near and dear to my heart: ‘Free Palestine,’” he said in a two-minute speech. “I said: ‘Free Palestine!’ I want those words to be loud and clear, so that people all the way in Gaza to the occupied West Bank know that we have not forgotten about them.” […]
Macklemore explained that the decision came after a week of “difficult conversations” with Sheeran, a friend of 13 years whom he considers a “brother”, though “as I told Ed multiple times on the phone, our friendship can’t change my responsibility to tell the truth about what happened.” According to Macklemore, Sheeran was under pressure from stadium owners rallied by Robert Kraft – the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots and their Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, where Sheeran was next slated to play – to drop Macklemore from the tour, lest the English singer be barred from their venues. “Ed was in a fucked up position,” the rapper wrote. “He knew it. His typical apolitical stance was being challenged in a way it had never been before.
“What I said at MetLife I have been saying on stages around the world for almost three years,” he added. “So why is it an issue now? Because now I’m sharing the stage with one of the biggest artists in the world, in some of the biggest stages in America.”

In acknowledging that this bullshit isn’t really Sheeran’s fault, Macklemore is being far more generous to him than I think most people would be. Cos ultimately, though Ed was placed in an undeniably difficult position, he did still cave to the pressure… he probably stood to lose millions of dollars if he didn’t, I know, but, well, with the news that his other opening acts and his own backing band have all quit the tour in protest as well, he’s clearly going to do that anyway now. Hard not to feel sorry for him in some respects, but if he’d shown a bit more spine he’d be in the same position financially but he’d still be respected to whatever extent he was before all this (however little that may admittedly have been).

Small mercies?

Ed Sheeran Threatens to Quit Music if Found Guilty in Copyright Infringement Case

Ed Sheeran is in the midst of trial for a lawsuit that claims his song “Thinking Out Loud” rips off the Marvin Gaye classic “Let’s Get It On.” His attorneys have spent the past few months unsuccessfully trying to get the case dismissed, but now, he’s raising the stakes by threatening to quit music entirely if he’s found guilty of copyright infringement.
Per New York Post, when Sheeran’s attorney asked what he’d do if the plaintiffs won the case, he responded: “If that happens, I’m done. I’m stopping… I find it really insulting to work my whole life as a singer-songwriter and diminish it.”
Sheeran has vehemently insisted that any similarities between his 2014 hit and Gaye’s 1973 song are purely coincidental, and that those similarities were too common to constitute copyright infringement. To drive his point home, he reportedly “belted out various mashups of Van Morrison songs for the courtroom on Monday” during his testimony, which probably did not help him as much as he thought it might.

I haven’t paid any attention to this case, which has been dragging on for some years now, largely because, you know, it’s Ed Sheeran; he seems to be a perfectly delightful person but his music holds no real interest for me… but when I saw him issuing this threat to quit, I thought I should perhaps see what the fuss is about. Consequently, I turned to Rick Beato:

And oh dear. Once Rick transposes the Gaye song down a half-step so that both songs are now the same key, you find it’s basically the same chord progression, same tempo and overall groove, and when he alternates the two songs one bar at a time… yikes. Not looking good for Ed, except that the latter goes to different places when it leaves that first part of the verse and melodically the two songs are completely different. I suppose the question then becomes can you prove it was deliberate (which I don’t think it was) and is it enough to merit this absurd $100m that the company managing Gaye’s co-writer’s assets (cos it’s not even Marvin’s estate this time) are asking for (which it surely isn’t)… I don’t know. Like I said, it doesn’t look great, but at the same time it’s also not the whole song; Ed’s potential problem is that this isn’t his first go-round with the copyright infringement thing, and though he did win the second one he settled on the first one, and that always looks like an admission of guilt (whether or not you are in fact guilty). Be interesting to see if he lives up to that threat if the case goes against him…

Parenthetically, something similar happened with my band, the Inflatable Voodoo Dolls… we had a song which I’d made, though calling it a “song” is dignifying it unnecessarily; it was called “I Believe Robert Smith is My Saviour” and it was basically a string of samples against a beat I’d come up with and the only melodic aspect of it was actually the cymbals which I’d pitched… anyway, it took years for us to solve the problem of actually putting a proper melody to it, until Joe (partner in crime, now housemate and spider wrangler) had the brilliant idea of just starting the fucking thing from scratch. The result was great but the little pattern of notes he’d come up with as the basis of the new track was almost the same as that of The Presets’ “Are You the One”… not that I expected legal issues or anything, but I suggested pitching it down and changing it slightly. Weird how I wasn’t worried about the battery of uncleared samples we had all over the album otherwise… but I don’t think there was ever much danger of us even being noticed, let alone sued over anything, anyway, given we’ve probably sold literally about a millionth of what Ed Sheeran has. There’s no money for Bob Larson to make from us…

EDIT: And he won. Looks like the Cradle of Filth collaboration will be happening after all!