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The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the most interesting, strangest, and funniest stories from around the social internet.
Ed Sheeran’s no-good, very bad week
Ed Sheeran is in the middle of a worldwide tour, and recently played two dates at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Rapper Macklemore opened for him on those dates, and quickly became a news story for giving pro-Palestine speeches on stage and playing his song “Hind’s Hall,” which accuses Israel of genocide.
What should have been a one-day story was blown up by billionaire Robert Kraft — who also happens to own the NFL’s New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium where Sheeran was scheduled to play next. Kraft, along with a number of other NFL stadium owners, gave Sheeran’s tour an ultimatum: Drop Macklemore as an opening act, or we’ll refuse to allow you to play at our venues. Sheeran’s tour concert promoter buckled under the pressure and removed Macklemore, kicking off a firestorm of controversy.
Every other opening act announced they were leaving the tour in solidarity, in addition to Sheeran’s backing band. Completely unrelated celebrities began making statements about the controversy. People started posting pictures of Sheeran pointing RPGs at Palestinian children. One Irish radio station announced it would no longer play Sheeran’s music. This was what the front page of /r/PopCultureChat, one of the largest celebrity subreddits, looked like during the middle of the controversy:
There are a lot of moving parts here. First, this was a terrible strategic move by the NFL owners. If the goal was to silence pro-Palestine activism, they Streisand Effected themselves and made it a much bigger story by trying to cancel Macklemore. Most musicians, like most artistically inclined people, have a visceral reaction to censorship, and what could have been a one-day news cycle is now a massive multi-week story.
I’m fairly sympathetic to Sheeran. He’s getting slammed, but if I had to guess, he’s probably just an apolitical dope who had all of this blow up in his face. I doubt he’s a bigot; he’s probably even softly pro-Palestine in a passive, “wow that seems bad” kind of way. He had to navigate a wildly pro-Palestine fandom culture and a group of wildly pro-Israel billionaire stadium owners, and that’s a very tough spot for anyone to work from. He folded under pressure and was surprised when every other part of the tour actually showed some spine and didn’t fold.
With that said, his statement was overly long, wishy-washy, and literally included the sentence “I am not complicit.” It’s giving “My I AM NOT COMPLICIT T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt” energy.
Also, if we can be honest for a second, the fact that it’s Macklemore who’s become a martyr is inherently funny, because come on, it’s Macklemore. He may be the corniest musical act of the last 20 years. He’s a white rapper best known for a song about thrift shopping.
Beyond the billionaire pressure and the opening acts leaving en masse, there are a few other factors that made this story go turbo viral:
Sheeran and Macklemore are both somewhat culturally cringe, because Macklemore is top 1% earnest and corny while Sheeran makes lowest-common-denominator mass-market pop. This makes viciously hating them from either side of the conflict easier. And boy are people hating — at this point, fans are cheering singer Ellie Goulding for allegedly cheating on Sheeran years ago with a member of One Direction (an event they have both denied).
Macklemore also had a really bad antisemitic costume incident over a decade ago, which naturally makes some people think he’s secretly been an antisemite this whole time. (For what it’s worth, he apologized and the Anti-Defamation League accepted his apology.)
In what may be the most ill-timed promotion ever, a previously planned contest to let people audition to open for Sheeran debuted in the middle of the controversy, and the audition portal was immediately flooded with “Free Palestine” messages and fart jokes. In even worse timing, the contest is scheduled to end on… Oct. 7.
All of this could have been avoided by just not censoring Macklemore. Even if you disagree with his message, letting him speak is both the principled thing to do and also the smarter strategic choice. This entire controversy is yet another example of the pro-Israel movement failing to grasp how unpopular it has become, to its own detriment.