In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
It means “fuck yourself.” I’m not breaking any news here. If you’ve ever directly engaged with Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself” — if you’ve ever given it the slightest bit of consideration and experienced it as anything other than ambient CVS music — then you already know that the “fuck” is implied. It shouldn’t be a shock. The title “Love Yourself” looks sweet and self-affirming. The song sounds that way, too — a sensitive acoustic campfire jam, with Bieber taking full advantage of the wounded-tremulous side of his voice. But the magic of “Fuck Yourself” is that it’s just an extremely nasty song. That’s why it’s fun.
Bieber had just gotten himself back into the world’s good graces when he released “Love Yourself.” The single came right after his massive hit “Sorry,” an on-paper relationship song that resonated as his apology to the world after years of being a little dipshit. “Sorry” works because it’s a lithe dance-pop jam about attempting to sincerely atone for your mistakes. “Love Yourself” does the opposite. It works because it sounds soft and friendly and nonthreatening while going for the metaphorical jugular. The world liked penitent Bieber, but if we’re going by chart longevity, it liked petty Bieber even better.
The contrast was probably intentional, and it probably helped the commercial fortunes of both songs. Justin Bieber achieved a massive 2015 chart comeback by embracing the slinky, streamlined sound of what became known as trop-house. That style allowed him to indulge his inner R&B singer over streamlined tracks that sounded like an evolution of the garish EDM-pop hybrids of the previous few years.”Love Yourself,” on the other hand, allowed Bieber to get much uglier while attacking a more outwardly wholesome coffeehouse-singer aesthetic. “Sorry” and “Love Yourself” appear back-to-back on Bieber’s Purpose album, essentially summing up two sides of the same relationship. They appeared back-to-back at #1, too.
As with so many of Justin Bieber’s biggest hits, “Love Yourself” has a songwriting credit for Bieber, but it didn’t start with him. Instead, this is another case of Bieber getting some extremely promising material from some of the day’s most successful songwriters. “Love Yourself” was mostly the creation of two musicians who had a little time to kill on a tour bus one night. One of those musicians is Benny Blanco, a producer whose work has been in this column a bunch of times already. The other is Ed Sheeran.
Ed Sheeran has been one of the biggest stars in the world for the past decade or so, and “Love Yourself” is the first time that this column will engage with him directly. If current trends hold, fully half of Sheeran’s appearances in this space will be for songs that he wrote for other artists. “Love Yourself” is basically an Ed Sheeran song, so we might as well get into his whole life story here. Edward Christopher Sheeran is only a few years older than Justin Bieber, and he mostly grew up in a little English town called Framingham. (When Sheeran was born, the #1 song in America was C+C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now).” In the UK, it was the Simpsons’ “Do The Bartman.” What a ridiculous country.)
Just like Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran was once a teenage street busker in his little hometown. Sheeran started playing music and writing songs when he was a kid, and he self-released a CD when he was 13. At 16, he dropped out of high school and moved to London to try to make it in music. He put out a bunch of his own early music by himself and worked different jobs for better-established musicians, but he really made a name for himself on YouTube. Sheeran was a wizard with loop pedals; he could put together an entire track right in front of a camera. He liked singing cover songs, and he was comfortable enough to attempt rapping — something that he still does from time to time. In his early years, Sheeran worked with a bunch of grime MCs and with the American rapper Yelawolf, which earned him some cred on top of the whole viral-sensation thing.
Ed Sheeran’s early work made fans of well-connected pop-star types like Elton John and Jamie Foxx. He signed a deal with Atlantic, and in 2011, he released his debut album +. (Sheeran’s first four LPs are all named after mathematical operations. It’s annoying.) The LP came out a few months after Sheeran turned 20. His debut single “The A Team,” which had appeared on one of his self-released EPs, became a big UK hit, going all the way to #3. In the US, where British industry buzz often doesn’t register, “The A Team” still made it to #16. Right away, songs like that established the Ed Sheeran persona — an ultra-basic sensitive-everyman acoustic-songsmith type who could sometimes get a little more mischievous with it.
Ed Sheeran started writing songs for other artists as early as 2010, when the British X Factor winner Olly Murs recorded one of his tunes. In 2012, shortly after Sheeran released +, he co-wrote One Direction’s single “Little Things,” a UK chart-topper that peaked at #33 over here. (One Direction’s highest-charting Hot 100 single, 2013’s “Best Song Ever,” peaked at #2. It’s a 6. The first solo One Direction kid will show up in this column very soon.) “Little Things” worked as proof that Ed Sheeran’s whole thing could be transmitted to other artists, and he’s continued to give away songs over the years. In the wake of his early success, Sheeran also toured and duetted with Taylor Swift. “The A Team” got a Song Of The Year nomination at the Grammys, and Sheeran lost Best New Artist to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis.
Ed Sheeran’s 2014 sophomore album x was a big deal. He worked with celebrity producers like Pharrell, Rick Rubin, and his “Love Yourself” collaborator Benny Blanco. The LP debuted at #1 in both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, x made Sheeran big enough to sell out Wembley Stadium a couple of nights in a row. In the US, he played arenas, and he landed multiple singles in the top 10. His big wedding ballad “Thinking Out Loud” made it to #2 over here, and it stayed at that spot for eight weeks, with the “Uptown Funk!” juggernaut blocking it from reaching the top spot. (It’s a 7.)
It should probably be noted that Ed Sheeran achieved all that success without the support of critics like me. I did not engage deeply with Sheeran’s work for many years because his whole vibe just put me off. Sincere emotions? Bad tattoos? Frizzy hair? General Muppet-esque countenance? Absolutely nothing about this guy was cool. It just put me off. Sheeran’s songs certainly can lean into the most irritating sides of his public persona, but he also knows how to construct a hook, and I probably should’ve been respecting the craft from the jump.
In any case, Sheeran and his buddy Benny Blanco had enough juice to get invited to the Toronto record-release party for Drake and Future’s collaborative album What A Time To Be Alive in the fall of 2015. (Drake and Future will both appear in this column, together and separately.) The two of them made a night of it. After they left the party, they took their tour bus to Domino’s and drunkenly convinced the kitchen staff to let them make their own pizza. Then they decided to stay awake until they reached the US border. To keep themselves occupied, they wrote a song. Later on, Blanco told Howard Stern that he asked Sheeran what was happening in his life. Sheeran didn’t want to write about it, so Blanco said, “Well, why don’t we write a song about not wanting to write what’s going on in your life?” That song became “Love Yourself.”
It was going to be “Fuck Yourself,” but Blanco said that he changed it because he doesn’t like to cuss unless it’s necessary. Sheeran has never named the girl who inspired “Love Yourself,” and he’s a happily married dad today, so it would be even ruder if he got specific now. But “Love Yourself” is a truly mean put-down of an ex. The narrator insists that he’s not even mad about how things turned out: “I didn’t wanna write this song ’cause I didn’t want anyone to think I still care/ I don’t, but you still hit my phone up.” He goes on that she’s way too hung up on herself, sniffs at her using his name to get into clubs, and admits that he should’ve seen it as a red flag when she didn’t like his friends. This line is especially brutal: “My mama don’t like you, and she likes everyone.”
Sheeran originally considered “Love Yourself” for a spot on on his third album, but he says that he probably would’ve tossed the song out before finalizing the tracklist. Instead, the song made its way to Justin Bieber, who was going through his own protracted, chaotic romantic situation with fellow pop star Selena Gomez. (Gomez will eventually appear in this column. In a bit of a plot twist, she’s coupled up with Benny Blanco now.) Bieber must’ve made that decision awfully quickly. About a week after the Drake/Future album came out, Bieber was talking about the Ed Sheeran song that he had on his album.
Bieber got a co-writer credit on “Love Yourself,” and Ed Sheeran later said that Bieber “did have input on it.” On Bieber’s Purpose, “Love Yourself” stands out starkly from all the dance-pop around it. For most of the song, it’s just Bieber singing over a heavily treated acoustic guitar. Ed Sheeran plays that guitar, and he also sings backup vocals. Toward the end of the track, there’s a soft trumpet-riff that Bieber wordlessly sings along with. (I wonder if Omi’s “Cheerleader” remix helped spur the brief run of mellow trumpets on pop songs.) Bieber radiates a sense of calm, conversational clarity, which makes the whole thing hit that much harder. It’s an acid burn of a pop song, made all the more scathing because it sounds so sweet.
Simplicity works in the song’s favor. “Love Yourself” has a big, classic hook, and it would probably translate just fine if it had the dance-pop production of Bieber’s other singles. In stripping it down to voice and guitar, though, Benny Blanco puts all the track’s emphasis on the words and on Bieber’s performance. He sells it. Bieber sounds tired and vaguely sad. He doesn’t come off angry, which is crucial. It’s more than his narrator is annoyed with himself for taking so long to realize that he shouldn’t be with this person. I like when he sings that he’s been so caught up in his job that he didn’t get it at first, since his job is pop stardom. And there’s something magnetic about the sheer dickhead power of telling a famous lady to go fuck herself.
Make no mistake: “Love Yourself” is a dick move. Justin Bieber didn’t write most of the song, but he and his team knew that people would hear it as him taking shots at his famous ex. That’s probably always been a big part of pop stardom — the speculation around “You’re So Vain” was half the fun — but it’s especially key to pop stardom in the social-media age. Bieber and Taylor Swift don’t seem to like each other very much, but their willingness to weaponize their personal relationships is something that they share. In any case, a dick-move song can be a whole lot more interesting than one that’s actually sweet, and I think “Love Yourself” qualifies.
Justin Bieber released “Love Yourself” as a single a few weeks after Purpose came out, and he performed it for the first time on a episode of Ellen. Like “Sorry” before it, “Love Yourself” didn’t get a proper music video. Instead, Parris Goebel, director and choreographer of the dance-centric “Sorry” video, made a clip of two dancers, the married couple Keone and Mari Madrid, acting out its lyrics via interpretive choreography. “Love Yourself” isn’t a dance song, and I find the video to be unbearably twee, but “Love Yourself” didn’t really need a video.
In February 2016, “Love Yourself” replaced “Sorry” atop the Hot 100. “Love Yourself” only got a couple of non-consecutive weeks at #1, but the song remained huge at radio for months. It makes sense. The track allowed program directors to get a little frisson of nastiness onto the air without adding anything too rowdy or raunchy for daytime playlists. At the year’s end, Billboard declared that “Love Yourself” was the #1 single of 2016, with “Sorry” right behind it at #2. Before that, only two other artists had the two biggest songs of any given year: The Beatles in 1964 and Usher in 2004. Justin Bieber was breathing rarefied air.
With “Love Yourself,” Justin Bieber joined the short list of artists with three chart-topping singles from one album. At this point, the “Love Yourself” single has gone platinum nine times, and Purpose has moved six million album-equivalent units in the US alone. I think the big singles are all great, but the album itself never made much of an impression on me. (I don’t rate “Company,” the next single, which peaked at #53.) Bieber got a bunch of Grammy nominations, and he lost all the big awards to Adele.
Bieber’s commercial comeback was the stuff of instant legend. After pissing off vast swaths of the American public, he was suddenly bigger than he’d ever been. Quickly, however, it became evident that he didn’t actually want that level of stardom. Less than a month after “Love Yourself” reached #1, Bieber launched an arena tour, and people quickly noticed that he looked listless and sullen onstage. He wasn’t having any fun, and things didn’t get better. At various points along the tour, Bieber would plead with audiences to stop screaming in between songs — something that pop stars usually encourage — and he cut a Manchester show short when his fans got too excited. Eventually, Bieber canceled the last few weeks of the run, and he didn’t tour again for years.
Bieber didn’t make another album for years, either. He didn’t need to. Instead, Bieber kept his hold on the zeitgeist by popping up on other artists’ tracks. In 2016, for instance, Bieber sang on DJ Snake’s #4 hit “Let Me Love You.” (It’s a 7.) That same year, Diplo’s group Major Lazer made it to #2 with “Cold Water,” a track with vocals from Bieber and the Danish singer MØ. (It’s a 5.) Ed Sheeran and Benny Blanco were co-writers on “Cold Water,” and Bieber kept working with Sheeran over the years. In 2019, Sheeran and Bieber made it to #2 with their duet “I Don’t Care.” (It’s a 6.)
Those songs were all hits, but a couple of tracks with Justin Bieber guest vocals did even better. In the virtual years ahead, we’ll see plenty more of both Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran in this column.
GRADE: 8/10
