Ed Sheeran has booted Macklemore from his U.S.tour after venues threatened to cancel shows over the rapper’s pro-Palestine comments, Macklemore said in a statement.
Macklemore also accused Robert Kraft, who owns Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts, of threatening to pull Sheeran’s concert if the rapper was not removed as a support act.Kraft rallied the owners of the other tour venues to follow suit, according to Macklemore, prompting Sheeran’s team and Messina Touring Group to kick him off the bill.“Ed was in a fucked up position,” Macklemore wrote of his longtime friend and “brother,” adding that they had spoken multiple times about the matter on the phone.
“He knew it.His typical apolitical stance was being challenged in a way it never had been before.” Sheeran told Macklemore that people objected to the phrase “Free Palestine,” uttered during the rapper’s two prior support dates on the tour.
(That and other comments irked, among others, Pink, who said, at the center of her own subsequent firestorm, “What I need is to be able to say, as a Jewish mom, ‘that scared me, and it scared people I love.’”) Macklemore, in his telling, responded to Sheeran that those words should not be “more offensive than tens of thousands of Palestinian children being killed by Israel.” Sheeran, Macklemore added, “couldn’t get past his public facing, ‘I don’t take sides’….[But] when one side has bombs and the bottomless financial and military support from America, refusing to take a side doesn’t leave you in the middle.”Macklemore added that he has been speaking in support of Palestine on stage for almost three years.
“So why is it an issue now? Because now I’m sharing a stage with one of the biggest artists in the world, in some of the biggest stadiums in America.At a certain level of exposure, ‘Free Palestine’ becomes too much of a risk.
If I kept doing the shows, saying Free Palestine, with Ed implicitly supporting it, th...