No seriously, the fact that this song is still popular is mind boggling. We already have two squeaky voiced Canadians in the top five, do we really need a third? Apparently so based off of this song's staying power over the summer into the fall and now getting into the winter. So let's discuss Shawn Mendes.
Remember last week when I talked about how Justin Bieber's career was pretty much on life support after all his legal and personal troubles the past two years? Well the music industry sure noticed this so we got a whole influx of brand new teenage pop stars to fill the void. We watched as record executives tried desperately to find Justin Bieber's successor. Remember Cody Simpson, Austin Mahone, and Cameron Dallas? Yeah neither do I. The music industry tried to make all these replacements stick badly, but none of them were able to gain any sort of traction.
Well fear not, 2015 we found a new teen heart throb in the form of Shawn Mendes. I had a feeling this kid was going to be big the moment Elvis Duran gave him an artist spotlight on his morning show early in 2015. The same thing happened early last year too with 5 Seconds of Summer and look what that did for them. But the moment I heard Shawn Mendes belting and strumming his guitar talking about melodramatic subject matters that are way too big for a kid like him, I had a feeling he would catch on.
And sure enough, there he is. Sitting in the Top 5 with his smash hit about a melodramatic subject matter that is way over his head. I can't be the only one who finds this song utterly wretched. For a song about heartbreak, he sounds absolutely uninspired. It doesn't help matters that he is covering up his lack of personality with a guitar. Adds even more fake sincerity to his lack of selling emotional distraught.
Everything about this song is straight up awful. The production is dull, the singing is horrendously boring, and the lyrics are chalk full of cliches that I swear I was back in the 1970s with all this kitsch. Words cutting deeper than knives, asking to be brought back to life, bleeding until he can't breathe, falling onto his knees...if he is going to use lines like these, the least he can do is sing them as over the top as possible. Because here they come off as just meaningless and everything about it is fake.
At least other white guy with acoustic guitar songs can do a good job covering up their shortcomings by at least trying to sound sincere. But I don't buy it when it comes to teenagers like Shawn Mendes, who don't have nearly as much life experience to know what love really is and what heartbreak actually feels like. At least when Justin Bieber was that young, he was awful in a hilariously interesting fashion. This is just a stale bland horrible in every sense of the word imaginable and I hope Shawn Mendes fades into obscurity not soon enough.
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