It is the law that every teen pop star eventually undergoes a very public sexual awakening, whether that be Britney cavorting with a snake or Justins Timberlake and Bieber respectively embracing debauchery and delinquency.
The persona of every solo One Direction member can be summed up as: “Yes, I have sex now.” Even Taylor Swift has abandoned her good-girl persona for leather and frenzied gasps. And so it goes for 19-year-old Shawn Mendes, a cherubic Canadian pop star who’s occasionally seemed less like an autonomous artist than a hard factory-reset Justin Bieber, or his primary influence, infamous lothario John Mayer.
How should a young, apparently heterosexual male songwriter best convey his sexual appetite, post-#MeToo? Online fandom is quick to decry the sexual politics of any song lacking respect for its subject or the community it represents. So, despite the myriad girls waking up on Mendes’s bare chest, or leaving him perplexed when they walk out after a one-night stand (“I thought you really felt this when we were talking about breakfast”), Mendes’s MO is all respect. God, he’s respectful: “I don’t know what it’s like to be you,” he duets with Julia Michaels on the earnest, folky Like to Be You. Woke, too: In My Blood is a rousing rebuke of anxiety, and dreary Khalid duet Youth assesses the struggle to stay young in a heavy era.
Mendes’s cheeky R&B is similarly clean-cut – Robin Thicke with the lines resolutely un-blurred, less rock your body than spoon it lovingly into the night. The start of the album is more adventurous: the ticking guitar of Nervous tells the story just as well as his sweet vocals, and the cross-purposes interplay of falsetto and deeper backing vocals on Where Were You in the Morning? amplifies his internal conflict. But towards the end, Mendes’s bottom lip starts quivering and his sensitivity becomes a tad toxic: girls who don’t love him back are poison, curses. Perfectly Wrong is droopy in the extreme. His attempt to detoxify pop masculinity is admirable, but you’re left yearning for a bit of rough and tumble.