Why Macklemore Was Kicked Off the Ed Sheeran Tour
· The Atlantic
Among the many reckonings sparked after the rapper Macklemore was booted from Ed Sheeran’s tour earlier this month, one of the more amusing ones has been about taste. Macklemore, who’d gotten ejected after saying “Free Palestine” onstage, is widely seen as a goofy mascot of Millennial cringe. Sheeran, who put out a statement declining to share his personal views on “this devastating conflict” and then continued his tour, is a folk-pop singer beloved at children’s birthday parties. Now some pro-Palestine music fans are joking that “Thrift Shop,” Macklemore’s saxophone-skronked 2012 hit, isn’t as annoying as they’d thought. As for Sheeran, his bland songwriting is serving as a rhetorical piñata. “This crisis is the worst thing that has happened to Ed Sheeran fans since their head injury,” sniped a comedian on Saturday Night Live UK.
Political allegiances and artistic quality don’t actually correlate, but it does make sense that music’s most consequential confrontation over Israel and Palestine has been driven by two of the least cool people in all of popular culture. Precisely because they’re perceived to have little edge or relevance, Sheeran and Macklemore offered a perfect test case for questions about whether popular music is expected to change the world or distract from it, rebel against the system or serve the man—and who exactly sets those expectations.
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The situation began earlier this month when the 43-year-old Macklemore gave speeches centered on the phrase “Free Palestine” while opening for Sheeran at two shows in New Jersey. “I want those words to be loud and clear, so the people from Gaza all the way to the occupied West Bank know that we have not forgotten them,” he said. He also played “Hind’s Hall,” a 2024 track that accuses Israel of genocide and voices support for pro-Palestinian campus protesters in the U.S. Imagery of those protests and the destruction in Gaza played on screens behind him.
Groups such as the Anti-Defamation League and StopAntisemitism quickly issued criticism calling Macklemore bigoted and—to quote a petition from the Israeli-American Council—“biased.” In a lengthy post, the musician Pink wrote that Macklemore had caused her to feel fear “as a Jewish mom.” Much of the outcry connected Macklemore’s performance to an incident in 2014 in which he caused offense by wearing a costume that looked an awful lot like a Jewish caricature. At the time, the rapper apologized and said he’d disguised himself with random props without realizing the implications of how he looked. The backlash then was loud but died down relatively quickly, and the ADL said that it “accepted Macklemore at his word.”
This time, the billionaire Robert Kraft, who co-owns Gillette Stadium, in Massachusetts, called Sheeran to say that he wouldn’t allow Macklemore to play his venue and that neither would a number of other stadium owners. On September 14, the rapper was dropped from the billing. Shortly after that, all of the tour’s other opening acts, plus Sheeran’s backing band, quit in protest. (Sheeran’s tour is still ongoing, though he is now the only performing act.)
Sheeran, one of the most popular musicians on Earth, has argued throughout this saga that refereeing controversy simply isn’t part of his job. “Those who come to my shows do not expect a political forum,” he wrote in his initial statement last week. “I have always used my platform and music to bring people from all backgrounds and cultures together and this won’t ever change.” On Saturday, after days of public outcry against him, he opened his first show since Macklemore’s departure by offering some thoughts on Israel and Palestine and apologizing for “mistakes” he’d made. But he reasserted, again, that he tries to stay out of politics as much as possible.
Sheeran has lots of company in the annals of musicians who have professed that their commitment to unity precludes them from taking a stand. Last year, Pharrell said that he “despises” politics because “when you pick a side, you are inadvertently supporting division.” Dolly Parton famously maintained bipartisan appeal by avoiding wading into most touchy issues. Billy Joel once described the role of musicians as “more like court jesters than court philosophers.” Ever since the Chicks drew conservative fury by criticizing George W. Bush in 2003, mainstream artists have understood that some portion of their audience prefers that they—to quote Fox News’s Laura Ingraham—“shut up and sing.”
That point of view has always been a bit at odds with the fact that many of history’s most beloved songs have been forged by struggle and sloganeering. But part of what makes Sheeran both successful and uncool has long been his knack for cleaving musical traditions of their social context. His slickly grooving songs tend to evoke artists who had a clear point of view—a Bob Dylan cadence here, a Stevie Wonder melody there—even as his lyrics stick to the generic or autobiographical. He is a proudly mathematically minded musician (check his album titles) who openly talks about chart positions and sales figures. He has calculated, no doubt correctly, that a market exists for music that hides itself away from the world’s problems.
But the thing about the word political is that its definition is always changing. What’s uncontroversial in one moment may be a divisive topic the next. And some issues that seem like ballot-box concerns can quickly snowball into moral emergencies. The free-speech questions related to Israel and Palestine have become so hot that they’re burning through his firewall—because it’s become clear even to him that silence is a form of taking a side.
Tensions have been building to this moment ever since Hamas’s October 7 attacks killed more than 1,200 Israelis, hundreds of whom were civilians attending the Nova music festival. Even as Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza—which has claimed at least 73,000 lives, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry—sparked so much outcry that it upended the domestic politics of Israel’s international allies, musicians have felt stymied in their own efforts at protest on the matter. The R&B singer Kehlani, an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian cause, lost gigs at Cornell and in New York City’s Central Park after pro-Israel groups and politicians raised objections. The rap acts Kneecap (from Ireland) and Bob Vylan (from the U.K.) faced criminal investigations in the U.K. and visa problems in the U.S. following onstage comments regarding Gaza. (More on those in a minute.)
Given the bloody history of anti-Semitism, those controversies have largely centered on the question of what divides legitimate activism from hate speech and incitement to violence. A Kehlani music video flashes the phrase Long live the Intifada, which many Palestinians hear as a cry for liberation and many Jews say endorses mass murder. After Kneecap’s pro-Palestine statements at 2025 Coachella drew media attention, footage surfaced of an earlier concert in which a member of the group yelled “Up Hamas, up Hezbollah.” (The band said it condemns “all attacks on civilians, always.”) At the Glastonbury music festival, Vylan’s front man chanted “Death, death to the IDF!” (which the group later said was not a call for violence but rather “for the dismantling of a violent military machine”).
Watching those episodes, other musicians have taken care to modulate their approach. Earlier this year, I covered a concert in Los Angeles, called Artists for Aid, that brought together 20 pop, R&B, and rock artists to raise money for victims of conflict in Gaza and Sudan. The event was serene and uplifting, sometimes to the point of somnolence; speakers and singers did not even say Israel onstage. The organizer, the singer Mustafa, told me that the event had been carefully designed to avoid criticism. Even so, the show was hard to pull off: Though he’d held two similarly mellow installments of Artists for Aid in New Jersey and London, Mustafa told me he’d been turned down by at least half a dozen venues in L.A. Those places gave no explanation for saying no, but he was sure their refusals were related to Gaza.
“Hind’s Hall” is, rather astonishingly, the most significant protest song related to Israel that’s been released by an American musician since October 7, and its lyrics take on the question of why musicians haven’t been louder about Gaza. “You can ban TikTok, take us out the algorithm,” Macklemore raps in “Hind’s Hall,” citing the theory that social-media regulations are targeting activists. Another line—“If I was on a label, you could drop me today”—suggests that artists who criticize Israel risk losing industry support. (Macklemore has long released music independently.)
To anyone who knows Macklemore mainly from “Thrift Shop,” a novelty hit in which he seemed to satirize hip-hop’s rags-to-riches tropes by boasting about “flannel zebra jammies,” his political salience may seem surprising. But the truth is that he’s always been an earnest—eye-wateringly so—contributor to the tradition of “conscious” hip-hop that approaches the medium as a tool for social change. His 2012 hit “Same Love” made the case for acceptance of same-sex marriage before it was legal in the United States. After October 7, he posted that Hamas’s murder and kidnapping of Israelis was “horrific” but that “killing innocent humans in retaliation as collective punishment is not the answer.” Weeks later, he spoke at a pro-Palestine rally.
Sheeran had to have known Macklemore’s politics when he booked him; perhaps he just figured that whatever he said wouldn’t prove to be very controversial. And indeed, Macklemore’s performance almost seemed designed to test what exactly can be said on the world’s largest stages. He didn’t use particularly inflammatory slogans. He went out of his way to specify whom he wasn’t attacking: “To all of my Jewish brothers and sisters, criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide in no way is criticism of you,” he said. “My message is for peace, love, for all human beings to be treated with dignity, respect, and equality.” But the answer came back swiftly and conclusively: Even a couched protest, on this subject, is going to cause a furor.
Some of Macklemore’s critics emphasized the need to protect the audience from discomfort. Pink objected to the fact that “he stood in front of a stadium full of music-loving families, with violent images from a war on the screens, dedicated a song to the movement of his choice, and then took the mic to tell all of the Jews in the stadium that it wasn’t about them.” The ADL wrote, “Imagine being a Jewish or Israeli fan who came with family or friends to enjoy the show, only to be confronted with this hostility from the stage.” Macklemore, in a statement, said that Sheeran had told him that “a lot of people he spoke with” view the words Free Palestine and the image of the Palestinian flag as “hurtful.” A StopAntisemitism tweet said, “Fans deserve apologies and refunds. Unacceptable.”
Those statements carry the implication that Macklemore broke a contract between performers and the public. But audiences aren’t a monolith (a lot of the stadium seemed to be cheering in videos of Macklemore’s comments). And audiences, as it turns out, aren’t who decide what’s permissible—behind-the-scenes power brokers are. According to Sheeran, the choice to drop Macklemore was made by venue owners and Messina Touring, the promotion company for many of the most prominent tours in America. Kraft acknowledged his role in a statement that accused the rapper of “sharing selective information and ignoring the actions of Hamas.” By that logic, Macklemore was banned based not only on what he said but on what he didn’t say: a breathtaking assertion of a venue owner’s prerogative to dictate on-stage expression.
“Israel does not have a more loyal friend than Robert Kraft,” Benjamin Netanyahu said in 2019 when presenting him with a $1 million prize, and Kraft’s involvement in the seemingly trivial matter of what a tour opener says between songs suggests larger geopolitical stakes at play. Voters in both major political parties are less convinced than ever about America’s continuing support of the Israeli government. The Palestinian cause—and related policies such as ending military aid to Israel and unwinding the two-tiered legal system that governs Gaza and the West Bank—has proved persuasive to the general public in the past few years. Defenders of the status quo have reason to try to prevent that case from being amplified.
The irony is that the tactics in this case are so blatantly repressive that they’re spreading Macklemore’s message—and the pro-Palestinian movement’s concerns about institutional deplatforming—far more broadly than would have otherwise happened. Macklemore’s words had been aimed at a ticketed crowd, but they quickly reached the national news. With even his backing band quitting the tour, Sheeran’s avowals of being beyond politics came to look, to many, like he’d clearly acquiesced to an act of censorship. Announcing a “Free Palestine” tour today, Macklemore wrote, “When the billionaire class can decide which voices are allowed on stage and which ones are too dangerous to hear, everyone should be paying attention.”
By Saturday’s show in Philadelphia, Sheeran had recalibrated. He opened the concert with a speech in which he said the question of Israel and Palestine now transcended politics: “This is a humanitarian issue and I cannot hide how I feel about it anymore.” After condemning the October 7 attack for compounding “centuries of Jewish pain,” he added, “What is happening in Gaza is catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate.” And he had a word, it seemed, for Kraft: “I am deeply worried about the idea that venues should pre-approve content of performers. This happens in so many places that I perform around the world, but it should never happen in the free world.”
He’s right on that last point—but the repression he refers to is of a piece with the kind of censorship that’s touched all corners of American culture in recent years. The Trump White House has issued threats to broadcasters predicated on the idea of restoring neutrality to the airwaves. Paramount Skydance has signaled a willingness to accept government input on programming decisions in the name of fighting bias. Cultural institutions have been forced to rework and ditch all manner of diversity-related programming in order to counteract supposed liberal propaganda. What’s become obvious is that calls for a less “political” public sphere do, inevitably, serve a political agenda.
At his latest show, Sheeran’s foray into political speechifying had him in tears, and he closed by offering an apology to families who “didn’t buy a ticket to hear that first bit of the show.” But he also said that it was the best concert he’d ever played, and that the backlash he feared he might face from his own fans never materialized. It’s as if he was realizing, in real time, that it wasn’t his audience who’d wanted him to stay quiet all these years—and that there might be unity to be found in going beyond the platitudes of a pop song to say what he really thinks.