Let’s, for our sins, talk about his politics instead—or alleged lack thereof. Yes, the Grand Mufti of Blandestine has a two-chord solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Come and listen to him strum gently, singing soft loveslop until you’re so numb from boredom, you’ll forget who you are or what you believe in.
Sorry, Ed, but that doesn’t work anymore. Not when you’ve booked the likes of Macklemore to open for you, a rapper who has indulged in 9/11 trutherism and antisemitic costume. And this is a moral authority on one of the world’s most-complex conflicts?
The fallout from this whole dumb war is insufferable. The celebrity poseurs who leech onto Palestinian activism are assigned enormous moral courage, yet it has cost them very little. The biggest loser here is Sheeran, who straddled a fence that collapsed beneath him when Macklemore kicked it.
On September 4 at MetLife Stadium, Macklemore opened for Sheeran and performatively worked down his list of other people’s grievances: free Palestine, free Lebanon, "free Cuba to the Congo to Sudan to Iran." Robert Kraft, the billionaire who owns Gillette Stadium and the Patriots, told Sheeran the rapper would not be playing his building. Other stadium owners fell in behind him. The promoter cut Macklemore from eight dates.
Then every remaining act walked out, and so did Beoga, the Irish trad band that has played with Sheeran for years. Which leaves a man whose tours have grossed nearly $2 billion (not a bad rate at a billion dollars a chord) taking a stadium stage in Philadelphia on Saturday night with nobody to warm up the crowd and nobody to play the fiddle. Sheeran’s defense is that he doesn’t do this sort of thing.
"Those who come to my shows do not expect a political forum," Sheeran said, shielding behind his child fans. He is "not complicit," he insists. There are, Sheeran explains, "different approaches to being an advocate for change." Sheeran once beat a copyright claim over "Thinking Out Loud" by arguing in court that chords are a songwriter’s alphabet, then telling reporters on the courthouse steps that "nobody owns the color blue." Fine, but it’s also a flawless description of his politics: universal, ownerless, incapable of offending anyone with a checkbook.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
