“Proof that one song is all it takes” as James Blunt’s Twitter biography put it. He knows what he’s known for, and in his post-superstar era he’s played his hand with great skill, cultivating a self-deprecating persona on social media as an affable gent who’s as sick of his big hit as you are. It makes him hard to criticise – if he’s not taking himself particularly seriously, why should anyone else?
The studied deployment of self-deprecation, or naivety, or indifference, are among the great skills of the English upper classes, of whom James Blunt is certainly a member. Old Harrovian, ex-army, married the Duke Of Wellington’s granddaughter, handsome devil: the type of guy who’d turn up in the fringes of Swinging London circles in the 1960s, appearing in a few Beatles and Stones anecdotes, telling a few more. Perhaps he’d have made a record or two back then, too.
Even for the 21st Century, it’s an unusually patrician background. But not as unusual as it once was. Blunt is a herald of two of the bigger trends in contemporary UK pop, and one of them is the increased prominence of upper- and upper-middle class musicians in the charts. The usual marker of this is private education, partly because that’s something you can actually get data on, but underlying it is a wider anger that opportunities for working-class kids to become stars have been throttled as a by-product of decades of changes in benefits, arts and education policies. With the end result that some degree of independent wealth is a near necessity to thrive in the arts, the record industry very much included.
This is a story with a lot of complicated elements – it’s aligned to the art school/stage school transition we talked about back when the Spice Girls were big, and also involves the ongoing professionalisation of pop – and it’s one we’ll end up touching on often. But “You’re Beautiful” isn’t actually the best moment to dig into it, because Blunt really was seen as an outlier. The fact this guy had been not just in the army but in the Household Cavalry, and involved with the funeral of the actual Queen Mother, was a genuinely unusual background that served as a big marketing hook for him, second only to his military service in Kosovo. So he’s not the best example for a wider gentrification of pop.
But this is where the second trend Blunt represents comes in. Because the reason Blunt’s marketing leaned so heavily on his background is that his actual music was not hugely distinctive. The most flattering critical notices for “You’re Beautiful” likened him to the then recently deceased Elliott Smith, a comparison that feels wildly deceptive beyond the extremely broad territory of “sensitive young man with an acoustic guitar”. It’s only helpful inasmuch as it points up exactly what James Blunt isn’t being here: introverted, hushed, raw.
You can find easier stylistic pointers to him, most obviously David Gray, whose surprise success at the turn of the decade with White Ladder had showed there was an appetite for men unpicking their feelings over a no-frills backing. Blunt has a similar reedy, querulous vocal tone to Gray, and both “You’re Beautiful” and “Babylon” use the acoustic guitar as the central element of a broader production canvas, suggesting the lone troubadour without actually sounding like one.
This kind of blokewave singer-songwriter material is going to be a larger part of Popular when we reach the 2010s. Blunt may genuinely find his hit a burden, or he may be doing a social media bit, but on the face of it “You’re Beautiful” is nothing to be ashamed of. It shares its earnest DNA with bigger stars to come, and it can also claim to be a cleverer song than it appears. It shares a trick with the similar, though nastier, “You’re Gorgeous” by Babybird, handing an apparently sweet chorus to an unreliable narrator whose actual relationship to the song’s subject is starkly different from what’s implied if you half-listen to the words on the radio.
Unlike “You’re Gorgeous”, Blunt isn’t subverting a romantic sentiment, but he is ironising one. “You’re Beautiful” isn’t quite a love song either; it’s a hallucinated, one-way moment of connection turned into a grand romantic chorus to show the scale and intensity of that drugged-up instant. It’s a neat construction, as it means the song’s relatable both as sighing endearment and instant crush – Blunt explicitly paints it as a hopeless one, but ‘Missed Connections’ columns in newspapers worldwide testify to how strong the appeal of the meet-cute fantasy is.
Those layers make the positive case for the song. But let’s take Blunt’s apparent disdain for “You’re Beautiful” as sincere and admit it – he’s right. There is something smarmy and vapid about the record that made its constant presence in 2005 unpleasant, and makes it an irksome thing to be reminded of now; less half-remembered crush, more regrettable snog. Maybe the way the chorus is so memorable and so easy to imitate makes its glibness harder to dodge, and even if that glibness is in some way part of the point, that doesn’t make it easier to stomach. And it meant that Blunt, the kind of songwriter who would write “You’re Beautiful” with a self-aware distance, was immediately pegged as the kind of songwriter who’d write it without that. No wonder he’s ambivalent.
Score: 3
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