Ed Sheeran Research Paper

British musical sensation Ed Sheeran has made a meteoritical rise into mainstream pop culture in recent years, but has been the unfortunate victim of commercialization of his public image, yet his music has for the most part maintained its authentic ingenuity and sincerity. Sheeran has developed a niche sound of genuine, heartfelt lyrics accompanied by an acoustic guitar, always played by Sheeran himself. His concerts consist of him on a stage with a looping pedal and a rotating cast of guitars. Unlike most performances by mainstream artists, who usually have an instrumental accompaniment, Sheeran creates his backing sound using only his voice and a guitar. His style could be labelled as “stripped-down” in comparison to other pop artists. However, a portion of his more recent songs cater to the upbeat nature of popular music, such as “Don’t”, “Shape Of You” and “Sing”. These songs receive airplay on pop radio stations, but exclude the rest of his more acoustically-oriented songs. This is consistent with the concept that pop and rock music forms the bulk of mainstream radio (Shuker, 2016, p.137).

His acquisition of fame is construed as natural due to his innate musical talent, instead of extensive publicity appearances and his association with other famous pop artists. Because of this, Sheeran can be theorized as having an immense amount of “cultural capital”, which he has “naturally” acquired (Moore, 2005, p.233). The theory of cultural capital as described by Moore (2005) can be directly applied to Sheeran’s rise to pop musical fame: Bourdieu (1984) theorized that cultural capital must appear to be innate or mysteriously acquired: People blow their cover if they make too much of an effort to seem rich or if they study the arts too strenuously. (Moore, 2005,