A frenzy of cancellation

The firing of Macklemore is now fuelling an ugly campaign against Ed Sheeran.

Given all the recent chatter about ‘Woke 2’ and what this latest mutation might entail, it’s hardly surprising to see that cancel culture might be adapting along with the movement that created it. The furore over the rapper Macklemore, who has been removed from the line-up on Ed Sheeran’s US tour, and the subsequent attempts to cancel Sheeran himself, suggests that cancel culture has entered its retaliatory phase. Cancellation now begets counter-cancellation.

Having been booked to open on the tour, Macklemore had interspersed his set at the New Jersey show with the usual sermons on Palestine and Israel, the sort of hectoring that has become ubiquitous among celebrities devoted to the omni-cause. After a petition by the Israeli-American Council, and objections from Robert Kraft (whose company owns Gillette Stadium, another stop on the tour), Sheeran’s promoters were given a choice: ditch Macklemore or find other venues.

This sequence of events has been abbreviated online to ‘Sheeran cancelled Macklemore’, and has resulted in direct efforts to cancel Sheeran in return. All of his support acts, as well as his backing band, have withdrawn from the tour in solidarity with the rapper. A radio station in Ireland has removed Sheeran’s music from its playlist ‘for the foreseeable future’. Pro-Palestinian groups are preparing a demonstration outside his forthcoming concert in Philadelphia. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) movement has called on Sheeran ‘to cancel his now compromised US tour’.

Since this is a case of various cancellations piled upon each other, it’s worth considering them step by step. In the case of Macklemore, whether or not he has been cancelled will depend upon his contractual agreement. He had, of course, been hired to perform songs rather than lecture his audience. There are few sights more tedious than a pop star berating the crowd. If I were in Macklemore’s audience, and even if I agreed wholeheartedly with what he was saying, I would be tempted to boo.

To give you some idea of the cringeworthy, ill-informed nature of his diatribes, here’s some footage from a gig in Germany in 2024 where Macklemore claims that a ‘free Palestine’ is the only way to atone for the Holocaust.

Amid the inane cheering, one hopes there are some audience members wearily muttering to themselves: ‘Oh please, just do that rap about buying second-hand clothes’.

The details of Macklemore’s contract with Messina Touring Group are unknown. Few would contest that there should be some limitations to how he spends his allocated stage time. It would scarcely be a violation of free speech if he had been dropped after refusing to perform any songs, instead reading aloud the first chapter of Middlemarch. It strikes me as perfectly reasonable to dispense with the services of a musician who fancies himself as an amateur demagogue and insists on boring his audience with his half-baked opinions.

And yet in this particular case I think it unlikely that Macklemore has violated the terms of his agreement. It is an accepted convention for acts to intersperse their songs with commentary, and it is virtually impossible that the tour promoters were unaware that Macklemore would use the time to speak about Israel. In fact, he openly admitted that one reason he joined Sheeran’s tour was to have a large platform for his political message.

Personally, I would avoid booking musicians in search of forums for their windbaggery. But if Macklemore was hired by people who knew perfectly well that political sermonising was part of his act, there is little justification for removing him once he did precisely what they should have expected. Worse, it has turned him into a martyr for the keffiyeh club, allowing middle-class leftists to proclaim that they too are victims of cancellation.

Yet the counter-cancellation has been far worse. Antisemitism has become so normalised on the left that many of the criticisms have taken the form of what journalist Eve Barlow has described as ‘Goebbels-style cartoons’. Many have depicted Sheeran with stereotypically Jewish features or clothing, labelling him a ‘shill’ or a ‘Zionist’. As ever, a dispute relating to Israel has descended into overt Jew-hatred.

It is a great shame that pop concerts are so regularly turned into platforms for tedious homilies. Anti-Israel sentiment is simply one of the many types of conformity demanded by the gatekeepers of the creative industries. It is faux-radicalism; the safest and most predictable position dressed up as rebellion. And, as the attacks on Sheeran have shown, it conceals a conspiracist antisemitic tendency that is growing out of control.

Cancelling Macklemore was as much of a mistake as hiring him in the first place. But the campaign of counter-cancellation has exposed the darker underbelly of fashionable political posturing.

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