Ed Sheeran’s decision on 10 September to capitulate to Zionist pressure and kick the rapper Macklemore off his Loop Tour, after the latter used his stage to express solidarity with Palestine, has exposed the sheer corruption of the capitalist music industry. The spectacular backlash by fans and artists in solidarity with Macklemore has equally exposed the misjudgement of the industry’s masters.
Sheeran is a wealthy English singer-songwriter (who occasionally plays on his Irish roots) whose bland, catchy musical style has earned him a global fan base spanning age groups; he has sold over 200m records, and his songs have been streamed billions of times on Spotify. His net worth is estimated at $400m. The North American section of the Loop Tour is promoted by Messina Touring Group and has achieved box office sales of almost $100m across 17 venues.
During his opener for Sheeran at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on 4 September, Macklemore (real name Benjamin Haggerty) called for ‘peace, dignity and equality for all people’, saying ‘Free Palestine’, expressing solidarity with the people of Cuba, Congo, Lebanon, Sudan and condemning ICE as a ‘terrorist organisation’. He performed his protest song ‘Hind’s Hall’, named after the Columbia University building occupied and renamed by pro-Palestine students in 2024 in honour of five-year-old Hind Rajab; the song condemns the IDF for the murder of Palestinians including Rajab, and calls for divestment from Israel.
A petition launched by the Israeli American Council demanded that Sheeran, his touring company and upcoming venues refuse to continue the tour while Macklemore was still on it. Robert Kraft, billionaire owner of the Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts, rallied the owners of nine other venues hosting future tour dates, warning Messina that they would bar Macklemore from performing. In a statement about this pressure campaign, Kraft cited ‘material shared from the stage during Ed Sheeran’s shows in New Jersey, and a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery that we believe has been deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community’.
Kraft is a financial backer of the genocidal Israeli state, donating $196,000 to Friends of the IDF since 2006 and $3m to US Zionist lobby group AIPAC. Kraft threatened to withdraw financial support for Columbia University in 2024 over its failure to get pro-Palestine student protesters under control. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated ‘Israel does not have a more loyal friend’ than Kraft.
On 10 September, Sheeran obliged his ‘stakeholders’ and removed Macklemore from the tour. As Macklemore described it, ‘[Sheeran] told me that the words “Free Palestine” and the image of the Palestinian flag were hurtful to a lot of people he spoke with. I told him that if those words were more offensive than tens of thousands of Palestinian children being killed by Israel, then there was a fundamental disconnect between where those people stood and where I stood.’
The response of music fans, artists and the public has been unforgiving to Sheeran. His Instagram account lost over 100,000 followers almost overnight, a small indication of the scale of public disgust. Sheeran’s own backing band and all four remaining supporting acts on the Loop Tour pulled out on 15 September in solidarity with Macklemore. Irish singer Aaron Rowe explained his decision to withdraw: ‘as Irish people we know all too well about genocide, forced famine and violent occupation. I cannot stand by and allow billionaires to use their position of power to silence the rightful voices of those who speak up against Israeli genocide.’
At the beginning of his set in Philadelphia on 19 September, a lone Sheeran read a non-apology from an autocue in a miserable attempt to salvage his career: ‘I have tried in my career not to be a political commentator of any kind, because I want my music and shows to be about unity, not division.’ Not only was this a blatant lie – Sheeran has publicly supported Ukraine in NATO’s proxy war against Russia – he still refused to name Israel’s genocide for what it was, speaking as if history began on 7 October, that the racist Zionist state is simply one side of a ‘conflict’… ‘the most complex political issue on the planet’. To an audience of millions who have been forced to witness Israel’s extermination of Gaza go unpunished, these offensive words ring as hollow as the heads of the PR crisis managers who evidently wrote them. As Macklemore himself said after being dropped, ‘There is no neutral position between the oppressor and the oppressed.’
The public revulsion at Sheeran has been withering enough to make the ruling class cringe. As noted by journalist Jonathan Cook (17 September), media outlets which previously had rounded on pro-Palestine artists such as Kneecap and Bob Vylan are now finding it difficult to hide the scale of embarrassment or smear Macklemore as anti-Semitic. After Macklemore pledged his $1m tour fee to Palestinian relief groups, Sheeran and Kraft attempted to throw money at the problem by themselves offering $2m each to Palestinian charities – unlike Macklemore they have not said which organisations would get this money.
The episode has re-exposed a deep rift in imperialist society, between the interests of the class that owns the culture industry and those of its audience: the masses whom it must conjure up but struggles to control. After three years of the Gaza genocide, widespread solidarity with Macklemore and the isolation of Sheeran show that the masses are as ready as ever to stand with Palestine.
Will Jones
