Ed Sheeran’s ongoing controversy is a deja vu moment. Macklemore was pulled from Sheeran’s tour after speaking up for Palestinians, and the internet is furious about it. Well, me too. But the onus shouldn’t be entirely on Sheeran. Let’s not forget, artists too are just pawns in this ecosystem.
I am not defending Sheeran’s stance. Public silence, especially when a fellow artist is being removed from a tour for speaking about a humanitarian crisis, can be questioned. Artists have platforms, and some choose to use them for causes that matter to them and others do not.
But in the attempt to hunt down artists, we tend to miss the real culprit.
Look at what’s actually happened in the Macklemore situation. He said “Free Palestine” on the stage he was invited to perform as an opener, for two nights. Within days, he wasn’t on the tour anymore. That decision wasn’t made by Ed Sheeran. It was made, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed out, by the people who own the stadiums and decide who gets to speak on a microphone and who doesn’t. We have become so accustomed to attaching a face to every controversy that we often forget to examine the machinery behind it.
A concert is not just about a singer. It is a complicated commercial arrangement involving promoters, venues, sponsors, management companies, ticketing platforms, security teams, and, sometimes, powerful stakeholders whose interests extend far beyond music. These people rarely make headlines because they don’t perform. They operate in boardrooms, not on stages, and that invisibility is exactly what lets them shape the conversation without ever entering it.
Also read: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she won’t listen to Ed Sheeran if it’s playing
Cancel the right person
Sheeran gets branded apolitical and spineless for staying quiet. Macklemore gets branded a troublemaker for speaking up. Both the stories let the actual decision-makers off the hook, who in this case is American billionaire Robert Kraft. The pro-Israel billionaire owns the Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, one of the venues where Macklemore was due to appear on stage as the opening act for Sheeran’s US tour in late September. If you want to boycott someone, boycott Kraft and all the concerts that will take place in his stadiums irrespective of who is performing.
Why punish a performer for decisions not in his control, while the organisers who actually enforced the censorship face no consequences? They will just move on to book the next tour under the same rules. If the goal is accountability, it has to travel up the chain, not just to whichever artist happens to be standing closest to the controversy.
We have built a culture where a mid-concert comment is treated as a definitive political statement, and where staying silent is treated as one too.
Some artists want to use their platform for activism. Others don’t, for reasons ranging from genuine indifference to contractual pressure or maybe just because they want to play it safe. If only we had put the same pressure on people who run the country, the world would have been a better place.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)