Well, here’s a mess.
Ed Sheeran just wanted to play his guitar for arenas full of people who paid good money to hear him sing. That’s it. That’s the whole man’s deal. He writes songs about love and heartbreak and whatever else, and folks show up because they like the songs. Nobody bought a ticket to get a foreign policy lecture.
But here we are. Macklemore, the “Thrift Shop” fellow who has been touring as Sheeran’s opener, decided to use his stage time at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on September 4 and 5 to deliver a full-throated “free Palestine” speech to 90,000 people. And now the whole tour is coming apart like a cheap sweater.
Seven stadiums, from Philadelphia to Tampa to Arlington, told the promoters: if this man stays on the bill, we pull the shows. Robert Kraft, who owns Gillette Stadium and a whole lot of patience for exactly none of this, said his venue doesn’t “provide a platform for hate speech” and pointed to what he called Macklemore’s “broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery.” So Macklemore got the boot. Not by Ed. By the people who own the buildings.
Sheeran put out a statement that, bless his heart, reads like a man who just wants everybody to stop yelling. He said it wasn’t his call. He said he spent a week trying to “build bridges.” He said his shows aren’t a “political forum” and that his audience includes “young people, often children, of all backgrounds.” You can almost hear the exhaustion in his typing.
And what did Macklemore do with his moment? He released a statement accusing Kraft of rallying stadium owners to silence him, then declared that if saying “Free Palestine” cost him the stage, “it was the most successful tour I’ve been on.” Successful. He got fired and called it a win. That’s not activism, that’s a man who’d rather be a martyr than a professional.
Then the solidarity parade started. Finneas, Billie Eilish’s brother, pulled out of his six South American dates, posting that “artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed.” Aaron Rowe, an Irish singer, quit too, invoking his ancestors and colonization and the Potato Famine, because apparently an Ed Sheeran tour is now the Irish War of Independence. Lukas Graham, the Danish fellow, dropped out saying “nobody’s bank balance should decide who gets to speak.” And Beoga, Sheeran’s own house band, friends with the man for over ten years, walked too, saying they couldn’t continue “as things stand.”
So now Ed Sheeran, one of the biggest touring acts on the planet, has zero opening acts. Nobody left. The man is standing there alone with his loop pedal and his guitar, and every single person who was supposed to share the stage with him decided that posting the right thing on Instagram mattered more than showing up for the job.
Here’s what I can’t get past. These are all wealthy, famous people fighting other wealthy, famous people, and every single one of them is pretending they’re speaking truth to power. Macklemore thinks he’s brave for saying something half of Hollywood already says every day. Kraft thinks he’s protecting the community by picking up the phone and leaning on promoters. The openers think they’re heroes for quitting a gig that pays them handsomely. And the folks who spent $200 on a ticket and booked a babysitter? They’re just supposed to absorb it all.
Sheeran said something in his statement that stuck with me. “If we only focus on shouting the loudest, nothing will ever change.” Now, I don’t agree with Ed Sheeran on much of anything politically, and I’m not about to start. But the man had it exactly right on this one. Everybody in this story is shouting. Nobody is listening. And the only person who tried to keep the whole thing from falling apart is the one getting blamed by all sides.
That’s not courage. That’s a tantrum with a microphone.