Macklemore, Ed Sheeran, and the myth of political neutrality
JVL Introduction
US rapper Macklemore was dropped as the opening act on Ed Sheeran’s Loop tour following pro-Palestine comments he made during a show in New Jersey. The headlines tell the story.
Ed Sheeran’s tour with Macklemore has imploded – The Independent
Ed Sheeran dropped by radio station in latest blow to singer over Macklemore tour controversy – The Standard
Support artists pull out of Ed Sheeran tour over Macklemore’s departure – Sky News
YouTube star Ms Rachel to match Macklemore’s $1m Palestine aid donation – The Guardian
Macklemore got dumped. Pink got canceled. Everyone else lost their minds – Times of Israel
It was billionaire stadium owner Robert Kraft, a prominent donor to Israel, who barred the rapper from further performances, saying he would not “provide a platform for hate speech”.
Sheeran’s attempt to calm things down, with a lengthy statement saying he doesn’t want to take sides, only raised the temperature. His back-up band and four other acts dropped out, jeopardising the whole tour.
For Israel’s supporters, inevitably, it was all about antisemitism. The Times of Israel wrestled with the issues in a piece titled The Macklemore battle presents a trap that pro-Israel activists have yet to escape.
We publish below a calm and reasoned response from musician Dave Randall, interviewed by Pluto Press ahead of publication of his new book, Sound System.
NOTE: Hear Macklemore’s song Hind’s Hall, an urgent call for Palestinian freedom, on his website.
Sign a petition from the BDS movement calling on Ed Sheeran to cancel the rest of his tour.
This article was originally published by Pluto Books on Thu 17 Sep 2026. Read the original here.
We should refuse to be silenced
An interview with musician and writer Dave Randall, author of Sound System
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Get all the way through the introduction by Naomi, to find it’s a link to something by Dave Randall! [I read the first edition of his book].
Now seen him live twice, backing Roland Gift [and at the same time discovered Faithless]. Roland still uses the RAR *star* as his avatar, 50 years on from the launch of Rock Against Racism. Before the Fine Young Cannibals, Roland was in a ska band : Akrylyk Vyktymz, a stalwart of the Hull RAR scene.
Small world.
It says a lot about the era of ultra-Capitalism and its media perversion of the public sphere in which we live, that Promoter Kraft actually thought money meant he had the right to dictate to the artist who he had on stage with him. ‘Imagine’ a situation in the 60s in which someone could possibly tell the Beatles, leave John Lennon at home, because of his Peace and anti-Vietnam war activism. Inevitably we’re already getting muddying the water bad faith of the lobby claiming of artists, ‘your job is just to entertain’, which negates the music history, of Woody Guthrie, Lennon, Baez, Dylan, Special A.K.A’s Free Nelson Mandela, Public Enemy, and so on.
Surely this singling out of Israel is antisemitic.
It’s incredible ignorant for Ed Sheeran to think the world around him does not shape the Arts. To drop Macklemore shows very little integrity on his part. Is fame and fortune more important to him than genocide?
Zionist billionaires that can silence pro-palestine voices, what next?
The fact they can do that within music is outrageous!
Apparently saying ‘Free Palestine’ and flying the Palestine flag some find it ‘upsetting’. I wonder how Palestinians feel when they see the Zionist flag (first zionist congress and later adopted for the Israel flag). Oh I forget only one group can be ‘upset and afraid’, whilst the other group being systemically cleansed have not right to be ‘upset and afraid’ of their condition.
Many well known people have spoken out and faced the consequences – Susan Sarandon, Maha Dakil..
It’s not politics in music but human suffering. The politics is how to ignore it in music and the arts. Leats we forget Band Aid, Labi Siffre – Something inside so Strong, Bob Dylan’s Masters of War, Sam Cooke – A Change is Coming, Public Enemy – Fight the Power, Billie Holliday – Strange Fruit, Midnight Oil – Beds are Burning, Green Day – American Idiot, The Special AKA – Free Nelson Mandela…
Where there is human suffering, injustices -it’s been in the music.
Oh and Free Palestine! Power to the People! We are many and they are few.
I find Ed Sheran a coward hiding behind “it wasn’t my decision, it was management” Come on Ed don’t treat us like idiots!! Management works for you and you had the final say.
How can anyone that comes from an Irish Catholic household, that sees himself as cultural Irish expect that the world is going to buy the ” I don’t do politics” in this instance?
To take a stand to expose the genocide going on in Gaza, the thousand of children kill and maimed, isn’t politics, it is a moral duty.
Solidarity with Macklemore and all the acts that stood in solidarity with him.
Alot of dislikes for my comment about the inherent antisemitism in singling out Israel, but no counter arguments. You lot are a joke.
This one is for Abe.The article was an interview with a musician who never mentioned Israel. Not the comments mentioned Israel, so I don’t see how that is ‘antisemitic’? That word is being overused when one doesn’t like debate. It really is binary thinking (good v bad).
Counter arguments to Macklemore’s ‘Free Palestine” you had a platform on JVL to give your counter argument but you haven’t done so.
By resorting to ‘you lot are a joke’ is binary thinking. Debate is essential but so is respect.
NB – Please read Kenneth Stern’s work on those overusing the word ‘antisemitism’ when they don’t agree with what is being said. Kenneth Stern is a liberal zionist but most importantly is the chief drafter of the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
Abe, why to engage in a counter argument with you? we don’t need to. We know and best still you know that this time around you are on the losing side. Get use to it.
When Rhodesia and South Africa were practising apartheid, the democrats around the world stood united against them.
Israel is engaging in war crimes and genocide against the Palestinians. It is playing in our TV screens whatever Zionist Israel wants it to cover it, it is exposed for all the democrats in the world to see it.
The majority of people commenting in this blog are Jews themselves.
Are you saying that somehow Israel is special, somehow exceptional and that the world should give Israel a free pass? Because?
Israel is engaging in genocide and crimes of lesser humanity and either in this decade of the next decade the ICJ will ensue its judgement and Israel will cease to exist as a Zionist State before 2048.
The US is losing against China, and China has not interest in defending Israel. I fear a new wave of antisemitism will start in the US where at some point within the next 10 years Jews are going to be blamed for the lost of living standards among WASP’s Americans. It would spread to Europe and a new round of antisemitism, the one that actually kills will start.
The US will drop its support for Israel, you just need to realise that right now in the US, politicians keep quiet about their links to AIPAC.
Macklemore is not an enemy, actually he is an ally. In the same way that he speaks for the humanity of the Palestinians, come the time he will speak for the humanity of the Jews.
Israel is NOT being singled out. Israel is the last remaining of three racist colonial projects – including Rhodesia, and Apartheid Africa – to seize statehood against the emerging postwar decolonisation consensus. So, its time is well overdue. Even leaving aside the current well documented Genocide, Israel is racist and the worst not just because it interferes in other’s democracies, not just because it’s a well-documented Apartheid state domestically but also has been an exporter of Apartheid. Here Israel’s Ambassador to Apartheid South Africa Alon Liel comes clean, “We created the South African arms industry,” says Liel. “… After 1976, there was a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies. “We were involved in Angola as consultants to the [South African] army. You had Israeli officers there cooperating with the army. The link was very intimate.” Alongside the state-owned factories turning out materiel for South Africa was Kibbutz Beit Alfa, which developed a profitable industry selling anti-riot vehicles for use against protesters in the black townships.” Surely Africans must have died from Israeli tech? From Guardian “Brothers in Arm – Israel’s Secret Pact with Pretoria” by Chris McGreal See – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/07/southafrica.israel
Btw Abe, perhaps comment posters are not engaging with you because it doesn’t seem like the question about why scrutinise Israel? – is asked in good faith! The Gaza Genocide has been cited by Amnesty International, the United Nations, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention & Genocide Watch and Melanie O’Brien: President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars to name a few. Israel’s Apartheid has been cited by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, President Jimmy Carter, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, again B’Tselem, Yesh Din and the International Court of Justice – the list goes on!
It was what Ed Sheeran said to his audience at the end of his concert which told the truth about him. In essence focussed entirely on thanking his supporters (as few as remain for seeing him through the difficult times he was facing, even at one point saying, ‘At times like this you know who your friends are.’ Not a word, not a single word, about the issue which was at the heart of his troubles, his ending a friendship because his career was threatened by someone speaking up on behalf of a people facing genocide. This is exactly the kind of cruel insensitivity we expect from Zionists, so his preaching his own neutrality is hypocrisy of a very high order. He backed Ukraine, he backed Jeremy Corbyn (!), why does he not back Palestine? The answer is pretty obvious now. He is a narcissist who follows the money, and in this case he follows Robert Kraft.
I’ve now heard not just what Sheeran said at the beginning and the end of the concert, but much of what he said during. He is as self-centred as you would expect an entitled multi-millionaire to be, virtually dedicating the concert to his own self-pity and his own courage in finding a way to do without all those people who has previously been his friends and colleagues. That’s all there was: me me me. And because his core audience are as fundamentally as adolescent as he is, they lapped it up. The man is a moral vacuum. Even if he recovers his career – which is likely since he is a brand and will be rebuilt with the help of those with whom he is complicit – this will follow him arounds for the rest of his life. There will always be some-one around to ask him what he thinks of a government using its military to destroy a whole people. One day he will have to answer.