Originally published in print, September 2021.
ELEKTRA: By dread things I am compelled. I know that. / I know what I am.
Sophokles, trans. Anne Carson
Oh wait ,is this ed Shereen voice? Amazing I listened this song without watching and after listening I watched in hurry.And there is legend singing this song 😀 Addictive song <3 <3
Harry Adhikari, via YouTube
Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, And saying, Where is the promise of his coming?
2 Peter 3:3-4, King James Bible
It’s been a long wait. Two years since his last album, and over four years since his last solo project, but finally (finally), King Teddy is back. Edheads around the world rejoiced on June 25th 2021, the day Sheeran dropped ‘Bad Habits’, the first single off of his upcoming album, =. ‘Bad Habits’ is a heart-breaking and vulnerable account of Sheeran’s own flaws, juxtaposed with the bop-worthy bass of a song that has already spent nine consecutive weeks at the top of the Irish charts. The single is only three minutes and 51 seconds long, and yet the impact it has had on our collective culture will most certainly last a lifetime. Amidst an ever-increasing wave of anti-Sheeran sentiment, I proudly stand to defend his masterpiece of a comeback.
It may come as a surprise to fans, but ‘Bad Habits’ was one of the last songs to be written for the album. Sheeran wrote it “when [he’d] sort of finished the album”, according to the BBC. Surely one would expect that such artistry would have been years in the making, not an afterthought to a near-complete album. However, Sheeran makes the dropping of a banger and reinvention of the self seem effortless.
Yet, the reshaping of Sheeran was not born of nothing. Sheeran has been open about the impetus of this song being his newborn daughter, and the personal urge he feels to better himself as a now-father. However, this is problematic for the contemporary feminist, as it fits the archetypal image of the man as only striving for self-betterment when faced with the encroachment of the feminine in the form of a daughter. Sheeran’s infant, Lyra Antarctica Seaborn Sheeran, seems to agree with the common disdain for her father’s music, with Sheeran himself noting that she “just cries” when he plays his music to her.
But of course, no infant could possibly hope to fathom the sheer poetic brilliance found within Sheeran’s single. Sheeran has historically been renowned for his lyrical prowess. Highlights include, “give me a packet of crisps with my pint” and “they say I’m up and coming like I’m f*****g in an elevator”. ‘Bad Habits’ surpasses even this artistry, and sees his penmanship rising to unprecedented levels. His mastery and moulding of the English language throughout the first verse is nothing short of miraculous.
Sheeran expresses that as soon as “the sun goes down” he “lose[s] control” over himself, and gives in to the unspecified ‘you’ figure, a motif that runs throughout the song. Sheeran sings of the “paradise before [his] world implodes”, a subtle nod to John Milton’s famed Biblical epic, Paradise Lost. In the aforementioned poem, Milton details the fall of Satan, which Sheeran cleverly mirrors through mention of his “world implod[ing]”. Themes of identity and change are ever-present in the lyrics, production, and music video. It simply cannot be coincidence that Sheeran’s transformation from non-threatening ballader to bass-loving vampire echoes the transformation of Lucifer from angel to demon. (Miltonic enthusiasts and Edheads alike are also sure to recognise the similarities between the chaotic and violent scenes in the music video, and Milton’s depiction of hell.)
In the chorus, Sheeran continues to deploy rhetorical devices to emphasise the extent of his ‘bad habits’. The pejorative adjectival phrase ‘bad habits’ is a common one, but Sheeran elevates it to a status of literary genius. His use of the personal possessive ‘my’ conveys a claiming of responsibility – he does not excuse his behaviour, instead recognising that it is his own to deal with and work through. Sheeran allows the listener to fully grasp how out of hand his ‘late nights’ have gotten through the tricolonic instances of internal rhyme present in “lose, or use, or do” and “two, it’s true, it’s true”. Sheeran’s use of epizeuxis is so culturally impactful that it rivals both Joyce’s famed ‘and yes I said yes I will Yes’ and Plath’s ‘I am, I am, I am’. The repetition of ‘ooh, ooh’ in Sheeran’s chorus is reminiscent of Classical Greek lament, ‘οἴμοι’, suggesting that Sheeran extensively studied the playwrights of antiquity in preparation for writing this modern classic.
But all this analysis still leaves one question unanswered: who is the mysterious ‘you’ that Sheeran keeps returning to? His apostrophic invocation has no elaboration, and yet ‘you’ is repeated 11 times in the single. He talks of writing the song for his daughter, but not to her. He attributes to her his relinquishing of ‘bad habits’, not enabling them. Perhaps the unassuming second-person pronoun represents the listener? This radical fourth-wall break that would imply Sheeran’s desire to please his audience is directly linked to his problems with substance abuse and “go[ing] too far”. Yet, this does not track either. Edheads were some of the most overjoyed when Sheeran denounced his ‘bad habits’, and Sheeran’s relationship with this addressee seems more toxic than that of his with his fans. However, in watching the music video, the identity of the addressee can be found. It is Sheeran himself.
Around two-thirds of the way through the music video, a car crash hurtles the ‘old’ Ed (albeit a CGI replica) into sparkly vampire Sheeran’s arms. The ‘new’ Sheeran gazes at his former self, eyes brimming with confusion, caution, and perhaps … wistfulness? Suddenly ‘old’ Ed melts in his arms, deflating like a punctured air mattress. Sheeran drops him. He brushes off his pink suit. Looking disgusted, he saunters away.
On August 3rd 1936, Jacques Lacan presented a paper on what he referred to as ‘stade du miroir’. On June 25th 2021, Ed Sheeran released the music video for ‘Bad Habits’. These events, separated by almost a century, mark two of the most significant advances in understanding of the theory of self and identity. The dawning recognition Sheeran feels as he looks upon his past self is akin to the forming of a child’s Ideal Ego. Lacan described the recognition of oneself as ‘self-alienating’, a disconcertion that Sheeran himself seems to be experiencing.
Sheeran made it clear in an interview with the BBC that he “wanted the video for Bad Habits to play on the nature of habits in a fantastical way”, as represented by his vampiric persona. However, the eagle-eyed viewer will notice that Sheeran’s blood-drinking entourage contains seven vampires, that is, the same number as the Biblical Seven Deadly Sins. In a daring, Faustian-inspired artistic choice, Sheeran literally surrounds himself with his ‘bad habits’. He bears his sins, personified, metamorphosed from concepts to people.
In the end, perhaps even the most anti-Ed among us may take something from Sheeran’s new ‘mad tune’ – that striving towards a higher self is always a worthy cause, that bad habits do not have to define us, or perhaps that a recognition of one’s true self can come from the acceptance of one’s past. But whatever axiom Ed intends to impart, no-one sums it up better than one cultural critic in the YouTube comments:
When I hear the music of this song I don’t know why I feel that the end of world is near btw nice song.
