Ed Sheeran has found himself in the most damaging moment of his career. But for the safest man in music, a controversy like this was possibly always waiting to happen. If your stock in trade is pleasant balladry, and you’re reluctant to give much of yourself away both personally and politically, the arrival of a controversy is far more dangerous than it otherwise would be. You can’t really quell your critics with a shiny distraction when your wares are designed to be as unassuming as possible.
Sheeran’s insistent apoliticism hit a wall this week, after the rapper Macklemore was dumped as an opening act for his US tour after voicing pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli government sentiment on his stage. Macklemore claimed that a troupe of concert-venue owners had threatened to pull the rest of Sheeran’s tour dates unless he was binned. One of those owners, the 85-year-old billionaire Robert Kraft, claimed in a statement that Macklemore had voiced “hate speech” on stage. Sheeran, meanwhile, denied being “complicit” in Macklemore’s removal but said that he doesn’t want politics at his shows, and confirmed that he had acquiesced to venue owners in order to not let down his fans and to ensure the continued employment of his other support acts – who, awkwardly, departed the tour out of solidarity with Macklemore a few hours later.
It is, to put it lightly, the worst thing to happen to Sheeran since his extended cameo in Danny Boyle’s Yesterday. Ticket holders are demanding refunds. Sheeran has been lampooned across the internet for days. And compared to the cavalcade of stars who have liked Macklemore’s instagram statement (Florence Pugh! Penélope Cruz! Zara Larsson! Hozier!), Sheeran’s list of high-profile allies is curiously threadbare. There’s mainly Kraft and the singer Pink – Sheeran’s sister in call centre hold music – whose initial platforming of a petition to boot Macklemore from the Sheeran tour has made her the Mrs O’Leary’s Cow of this entire situation.
In his carefully worded statement on the Macklemore drama, Sheeran said he doesn’t use his platform for political statements as his audience “includes young people, often children, of all backgrounds”. He added that he wants “peace”, that his platform is designed to be a place of “safety and sanctuary”, and that he wishes to “keep conversations open, not closed” – while posting his statement on his Instagram with the comments section turned off. Sheeran’s explanation read as profoundly naff for any moment let alone our current one.
It also exposed how out-of-step Sheeran is with the realities of being a celebrity right now, or how a young and politically minded generation of digital natives are keen to know where their favourite artists stand on the biggest topics of today. The continued conflict in Gaza remains a key issue today, just as Black Lives Matter did in 2020, and the election of Donald Trump did in 2016. Maintaining a bland, frictionless neutrality – however well it may have benefited the artist in the first place – no longer works, with even the previously untouchable-seeming Beyoncé facing criticism of late from fans uneasy with her continued silence on Gaza, her appearance at a charity event last year with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and her recent selling of a £948 empty wooden box on her online merch store. Taylor Swift and Harry Styles, too, are regularly pilloried online for largely avoiding making public statements on political matters – particularly when their net worths would be significantly less impacted by speaking out than those of, say, the tiny Irish bands who’ve this week pulled out of Sheeran’s tour.
For Sheeran specifically, there’s also the poisoned chalice of having your entire brand revolve around how nice and normal you are. Sheeran emerged in an era that the journalist Peter Robinson termed “the new boring” in 2011, describing him – along with Adele, Mumford & Sons and X Factor contestants singing in “the self-consciously excitement-free vocal style of Tom Waits in a Strepsil famine” – as a plague on British pop culture. But there was also money to be made in it, with his town-centre busker image and syrupy love songs (with occasional hip-hop beats, of course) sending his career stratospheric. He had messy hair. He’d talk about sofa-surfing a lot. He’s just a regular bloke. And he’s sold more than 200m records to date, each one of his albums diverting little from the sounds and lyrics of its predecessors. Why fix what isn’t broken?
But it also leaves Sheeran in a very difficult spot when things go awry. The careful fence-sitting Sheeran demonstrated this week was no surprise based on his creative history. But it’s tricky to maintain an ordinary, relatable image when it’s been very widely exposed that you’re tight with at least one billionaire – Sheeran performed at Kraft’s wedding in 2022, and, per his statement, they have one another’s personal numbers. Kraft is also a Trump ally and has funded anti-BDS campaigns in Israel, leading Benjamin Netenyahu to declare that “Israel does not have a more loyal friend than Robert Kraft”. He also pulled funding to Columbia University amid campus protests against the actions of the Israeli government. And wherever you sit politically, we can surely all agree that it’s probably not great for the planet for a handful of eye-wateringly rich people to determine what can be said out loud on a stage because they have a few concert venues in their vast business portfolio.
This, whether Sheeran cares to admit it or not, is the world he currently occupies. Not one of artistry or shared humanity, but one of business-speak and billionaires. (Even his and Kraft’s overnight pledge to donate $2m worth of “aid in the region” of Israel and Palestine was curiously vague, unlike Macklemore’s own $1m pledge to a series of specific organisations including the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and Gaza Soup Kitchen.)
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Sheeran’s Macklemore-less gigs will go ahead this month – it would be astronomically expensive to pull them entirely at this point – and he will continue to make music. It’s also arguable that much of the criticism and mockery he’s faced this week stems from people who never especially liked him in the first place. It’s very easy to boycott an artist who hadn’t troubled your Spotify anyway. But reputationally it feels grave, filling the slight void that was always at the heart of Sheeran’s public image. Being boring was a money-spinner 15 years ago. Today it’s a minefield.