Essay: Breaking down the Ed Sheeran tour debacle

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Set us as preferred In a matter of days, Ed Sheeran has gone from the most agreeable, defiantly middle-of-the-road singer-songwriter on the pop charts to music’s newest villain.The Times’ August Brown and Mikael Wood gathered to break down what happened — and to figure out what it all means.August Brown: To recap, Sheeran dropped his tour opener, the rapper Macklemore, after the MC described Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide and said “Free Palestine” onstage this month at two New Jersey dates of Sheeran’s ongoing stadium tour.

Macklemore, in a statement, cited his long friendship with Sheeran while criticizing the singer for allegedly acquiescing to a demand from Robert Kraft, the owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots, that the rapper not be allowed to perform at the Patriots’ Gillette Stadium outside Boston due to his comments.Kraft, a Trump-supporting billionaire with his own colorful history, released a statement about the tour, saying he was “ensuring that events held at our venue do not provide a platform for hate speech.”But Sheeran, who performed at Kraft’s wedding in 2022, arguably made things much worse with his own comments on the decision to drop Macklemore from the tour, which ranged from shifting accountability (“Macklemore coming off tour was the promoter’s decision, it was not mine”) to promising that he held compassionate beliefs on this volatile issue but wouldn’t articulate them publicly (“I am not complicit.I have my personal views on this devastating conflict.

Just because I choose not to speak publicly, it doesn’t mean I don’t have them, and it doesn’t mean I don’t care.”) Music Macklemore confirms ‘Ed Sheeran and his team’ decided to remove him from the latter’s tour.The ‘Thrift Shop’ musician faced scrutiny for his onstage support of Palestin...