Ed Sheeran – Azizam

Eurovision, politics, Phil Collins, we’ve got it all…

[Video]
[5.27] 

Alex Clifton: I’ve got a soft spot for Ed Sheeran — he’s easy to dunk on at times but I do admire the man’s songwriting and ability to hit upon a melodic line that scratches my brain just right. I also appreciate that he’s no longer sticking exclusively with “man with a guitar” material but expanding his musical palette. “Azizam” is a fun party song, made to get you off your feet and into the crowd, and it’s certainly different from a lot of the radio these days. Moreover I just like hearing artists not take themselves quite so seriously and have fun with the material, and clearly Sheeran is having a ball here. Added a point because the music video is my kind of doofy.
[7]

Mark Sinker: The feel and the groove and the utopian glide of 80s Level 42 — and if not quite the full unhinged Mark King underlay, the bass has a nice plump sound too. Plus a sepia-filter echo of the kind of Orientalist inflection that once marked the very best Eurovision entries — Greek, Turkish, ranging ever east after 1994, to enrage Terry Wogan, and please those with ears. This possibly makes the song sound more exciting than it is.
[5]

Alfred Soto: With a laryngeal massage designed to make him sound like 2007-era Justin and a bass thump as seductive as any crunk, Ed Sheeran wants audiences to know he moves like water (oh) and he’s in love with the shape of you (again). I don’t at all mind it — the dude’s adept with the hooks, as usual. I would not meet him on the floor tonight but I can trust a friend to meet him.
[6]

Claire Davidson: The balladry that has become Ed Sheeran’s trademark may prompt an eye roll from me at its most treacly, but it’s always been Sheeran’s straightforward pop material that truly exasperates me. Like his frequent collaborator Taylor Swift, Sheeran lacks the buoyancy to carry a hook with any real propulsive groove to it — he is, for better and for worse, far too earnest for the ephemeral quality inherent to uptempo pop. “Azizam” has an advantage over tracks like “Bad Habits” and “Shivers,” if only due to the momentum of its aggressively stuttering bassline, but everything Sheeran adds to that foundation leaves the song feeling airless, from the bona fide choir that accompanies him on the hook to the chipmunked repetition of the phrase “get up, get up” that’s just audible enough to grow irritating. Sheeran, of course, sounds more anxious than eager to join his partner in the dance he narrates in the lyrics, to the point that the line “Show me how to move like the water” is almost laughable for how ill-equipped he is to sell it. More than anything, “Azizam” seems desperate, busying itself with far more ideas than it can hold in the hopes of reclaiming an audience that has grown bored of Sheeran’s bland sincerity. Even the title, a Persian word that translates to “my dear,” reads like a flagrant grasp for novelty—am I supposed to believe this is the work of one of the hundred most influential people in the world?
[5]

Ian Mathers: I keep hearing that Sheeran in person is a really likable, charismatic guy. So at this point I’m just wondering: why does absolutely none of that come through in his performances? Why is it that every time I become aware that I am listening to Ed Sheeran sing my first reaction is “wait, that’s what Ed Sheeran’s voice sounds like?” (Every time! I have yet to retain any memory of it.) Even with an international cast of collaborators here this sounds vaguely like every other Ed Sheeran song I’ve heard, partly because none of them have made an impression on me. But none of them are that bad either. I guess every era in pop needs its own avatar of Mid Yet Huge.
[5]

Jel Bugle: It’s Ed Sheeran! Almost tempted to give this 10, because he just keeps delivering the hits – a hit machine, unstoppable, the pinnacle! The pop overlord of the 21st century, the charts in his iron like grip! Anyway, it’s alright, it’s Ed Sheeran.
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Fun fact: Phil Collins was the exact same age when he released “Sussudio” as Ed Sheeran is now! Good for both of them.
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: It would be foolish to deny, as I’ve tried to in the past, that Ed Sheeran is an immensely talented songwriter. Here he uses his talents to wage a pitched battle against the distinctiveness and particularity of a non-native musical tradition, and by the sounds of it, the advantage is his. Sheeranization may be a more benign form of assimilation than that recently put forward by PM Starmer, in that if all else fails you can still at least imagine yourself dancing to it. More than dancing, though, “Azizam” is tailor-made for walking buzzed and bleary-eyed through the plaza of some faceless entertainment complex, sifting through the bar and restaurant crowds for something that doesn’t look like an overpriced scam, as a hypnotically familiar shuffle beat blares unheeded through every nearby loudspeaker. The real “island of strangers,” in other words.
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: Azizam feels like too much of a tender phrase for such a song. Sheeran foregrounds his perspective in both verses, starting with a drawn out “I” that starts off each lyric too high in his register, forcing him to wind back down to his lower register at each pre-chorus, which even has better lyrics: “til the sun is awake, be a magnet on me.” The flimsy, filmy verses diminish the power of both the pre-chorus and chorus, where his triumphant “AZIZAM” flutters up, so high his verses drag the song’s ebullience down. We are to use the lack of detail in each verse as a lookbook for our own relationships, but that lack of detail prevents us from doing so; what can “I want to live here in the moment we found” mean other than “I want to live in the moment”? The other person doesn’t enter into it. Azizam means “my dear” in Persian, and its a fantastic phrase to sing, but it belongs in a personal, detailed song for a person, not a simple placeholder phrase for a pop banger.
[5]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Help, I’m trying to figure out what this indicates about Westerners’ views of Iran, but I keep getting distracted by how slapdash the actual song is. Ed Sheeran, never a stranger to unwieldy hyper-literalism, has gifted us with such lyrical gems as “I wanna be close to your face”, while involuntarily rocketing away from Graceland at hypersonic speed.
[4]

Julian Axelrod: Nobody wants to be the guy who’s like “Actually the new song where Ed Sheeran does Persian music is good” but someone has to say it: The new song where Ed Sheeran does Persian music is good.
[7]