Ed Sheeran: I Don’t Care (with Justin Bieber) review – the most surefire pop hit of the year
Two seismic stars, one super-producer and a chorus that only leaves your head after surgery … ubiquity is assured for this breezily infectious smash
You only have to look at the charts to see that the public don’t pay huge attention to what critics think about a song or album before committing to a purchase. But some songs make a critic feel more useless than others. So it is with the appropriately titled I Don’t Care, a track so obviously destined to be a nailed-on, utterly inescapable smash that expressing an opinion about it seems almost besides the point.
It is a collaboration between a singer-songwriter who earned more money last year than any other artist has ever earned in 12 months – Ed Sheeran’s 94-gig world tour brought in $432m – and a pop star who has shifted more than 150m albums and, at 25, has survived enough scandal to fell a lesser figure several times over. Moreover, the partnership has what the police would call form. Justin Bieber turned a Sheeran cast-off called Fuck Yourself into Love Yourself, the biggest-selling US single of 2016. Its success followed that of Cold Water, a Bieber collaboration with Major Lazer that went to No 1 in 18 countries, despite Sheeran claiming to have forgotten he’d written it.