Ed Sheeran’s Two-Chord Solution to Pop’s Dumbest War - Newsweek

Make it stop already; my ears are bleeding. Can anyone stand to listen to this crap anymore? But enough about Ed Sheeran’s music. Let’s, for our sins, talk about his politics instead—or alleged lack thereof.

Yes, the Grand Mufti of Blandestine has a two-chord solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Come and listen to him strum gently, singing soft loveslop until you’re so numb from boredom, you’ll forget who you are or what you believe in.

Sorry, Ed, but that doesn’t work anymore. Not when you’ve booked the likes of Macklemore to open for you, a rapper who has indulged in 9/11 trutherism and antisemitic costume. And this is a moral authority on one of the world’s most-complex conflicts?

The fallout from this whole dumb war is insufferable. The celebrity poseurs who leech onto Palestinian activism are assigned enormous moral courage, yet it has cost them very little.

The biggest loser here is Sheeran, who straddled a fence that collapsed beneath him when Macklemore kicked it.

On September 4 at MetLife Stadium, Macklemore opened for Sheeran and performatively worked down his list of other people’s grievances: free Palestine, free Lebanon, "free Cuba to the Congo to Sudan to Iran."

Robert Kraft, the billionaire who owns Gillette Stadium and the Patriots, told Sheeran the rapper would not be playing his building. Other stadium owners fell in behind him.

The promoter cut Macklemore from eight dates. Then every remaining act walked out, and so did Beoga, the Irish trad band that has played with Sheeran for years.

Which leaves a man whose tours have grossed nearly $2 billion (not a bad rate at a billion dollars a chord) taking a stadium stage in Philadelphia on Saturday night with nobody to warm up the crowd and nobody to play the fiddle. Or even a tiny violin.

Sheeran’s defense is that he doesn’t do this sort of thing. "Those who come to my shows do not expect a political forum," Sheeran said, shielding behind his child fans.

He is "not complicit," he insists. There are, Sheeran explains, "different approaches to being an advocate for change."

Sheeran once beat a copyright claim over "Thinking Out Loud" by arguing in court that chords are a songwriter’s alphabet, then telling reporters on the courthouse steps that "nobody owns the color blue."

Fine, but it’s also a flawless description of his politics: universal, ownerless, incapable of offending anyone with a checkbook. Beige is probably more fitting than blue, though.

And there are some awkward receipts for Mr. Apolitical (not least agreeing to Macklemore as a support act, given his own very vocal strength of political feeling.)

Sheeran played a Ukraine benefit and cut a video with a Ukrainian military band. In 2024, he announced he would have refused Band Aid 40 the use of his vocals, having changed his mind about the imagery.

The man takes positions constantly. He just takes ones nobody who owns a stadium minds. Neutrality that reliably lands on the same side of the room is not neutrality. It’s a business model. And, until now, it worked.

As for the last honest voice in pop, let’s come back to him for a moment.

Macklemore’s 2005 "Bush Song" pinned the towers on Freemasons chasing oil money. In 2009, he tweeted that Bush knocked them down—a rap lyric from a Mos Def song.

In 2014, he performed in a prosthetic hook nose, wig and beard and insisted the costume was random, rather than the shockingly antisemitic outfit it looked like. He apologized, and the ADL accepted it, which is more charity than he’s extending to political opponents.

A peculiar choice of conscience. To be honest, Mackleless is Macklemore.

The venues are a real farce, too. AT&T Stadium was reported among those refusing Macklemore ahead of Sheeran’s October 24 date. Yet, on November 7, the same building hosts Ye.

That is the Ye who ran a Super Bowl ad for a store selling swastika T-shirts, released a song called "Heil Hitler," and got himself banned from Twitch for a Nazi salute. Ye apologized in January, full page, in The Wall Street Journal, and the American dates just rolled on.

The Sheeran reaction has been amusingly over-the-top. The Intercept declared the episode a watershed for Palestine solidarity. Roger Waters sorted humanity into people who do the right thing like Macklemore and "p***ks" like Ed Sheeran.

Colin Kaepernick, the one man here who actually lost a career over a protest, went on a podcast to accuse NFL owners of collusion.

Gaza’s ceasefire, meanwhile, is almost a year old and going nowhere, the second phase of Donald Trump’s big peace deal unimplemented, and Israeli forces holding roughly two-thirds of the territory.

None of that conflict turns on who opens at MetLife, no matter how many chords they can play. The Israeli government and Hamas are not awaiting any diplomatic signals from a Hobbit with an acoustic guitar, or rappers who think jet fuel can’t melt steel beams.

But the one measurable Palestinian outcome of the entire affair was cash.

Macklemore handed over his $1 million in tour earnings to six aid groups and dared Kraft to match him. Kraft pledged $2 million to "fight this humanitarian crisis." Sheeran had called and asked Kraft to commit it, matching $2 million of the musician’s own.

So the pro-Israel billionaire everyone is calling a censor has pledged one of the biggest sums for the Middle East in this story. But everyone got what they came for. A moral outrage, a hashtag, a standing ovation, and their next booking.

Only Sheeran walks away substantially poorer. He is down three support acts, a band, a reported $2 million and the one asset he spent a career building—the impression that he stands for nothing much and therefore cannot be held against anything.

Sheeran finally took a side, and still both of them think he picked the wrong one. Not even his favorite couple of chords can save him.

Of course, he named the tour "Loop."