‘Is it for people who are singers, songwriters, artists to be taking public positions on very, very controversial, difficult, complicated issues?’ Laura Kuenssberg asked the panel on her Sunday morning politics show, after the pop star Ed Sheeran was criticised for capitulating to pressure to drop his support act, the rapper Macklemore, for expressing pro-Palestinian sentiments.
There was plenty wrong with Kuenssberg’s question. First, there is a long tradition – from Bob Dylan to Bob Vylan – of singers taking overtly political stances. Second, the whole idea of public figures being ‘apolitical’ is a fallacy. To be silent on an issue, or to appeal to ‘both sides’ (as Sheeran did in his teleprompted apology), is itself to take a political stance – and when the issue is genocide, silence or equivocation is complicity. Third, even the posture of neutrality is, in practice, highly selective: Sheeran had no problem being ‘political’ when it came to fundraising for Ukraine. Fourth, the claim that the situation in Israel and Palestine is ‘complicated’ has always been ideological code for a pro-Israel position (disguising the stark one-sidedness of the reality). In recent days, the internet has filled with memes juxtaposing Sheeran’s description of Israel’s war on Gaza as ‘the most complex political issue on the planet’ with aerial pictures of towns reduced to rubble and quotes from doctors about holding the brains of babies in their hands.
But there is a more basic problem with Kuenssberg’s question, and with discussion of the Sheeran-Macklemore debacle more generally. In much of the coverage, the reality of the incident is turned on its head, as people ask whether Sheeran has been unfairly cancelled for failing to take a sufficiently strong stand against Israel (Lisa Nandy, the secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, has extended Sheeran her ‘deep sympathy’). In this framing, the question is whether artists should be free to affect a position of political neutrality (as Richard Osman remarked, ‘that’s a decision you absolutely are allowed to make and I respect that’).
Listening to all this, you could be forgiven for thinking that Sheeran had been dropped from his tour for not being pro-Palestinian enough. But of course he wasn’t. It was Macklemore who was dropped – for calling for a ‘free Palestine’ and ‘for all human beings to be treated with dignity, respect and equality’ – and Sheeran was primarily criticised not for his failure to take a particular stance on Israel and Palestine, but for his failure to stand up for a fellow performer who had been dropped from his tour for taking such a position. It is Macklemore, not Sheeran, who has been barred from performing. Yet somehow the story is about Sheeran’s freedom to be apolitical.
The incident fits a broader pattern in the discourse around ‘free speech’ and ‘cancel culture’: whatever comes from the top down is freedom; whatever comes from the bottom up is bullying and censorship. When Macklemore is dropped at the behest of the billionaire stadium owner Robert Kraft, it’s an exercise of the freedom of businesses to ‘demonstrate their values’ by deciding whom to platform. But when Ed Sheeran’s fans decide not to buy tickets to his performances, or even demand refunds, it’s bullying, mob behaviour. Since most people are not billionaires and do not own stadiums, they can exercise meaningful power only collectively. The collective exercise of power must therefore be demonised.
This fundamentally anti-democratic orientation is implicit in the framing of Kuenssberg’s question: singers should not be taking positions on ‘difficult, complicated’ political issues; they should know their place – i.e. to entertain us – and so should their fans. Politics should be left to the experts, which presumably means the politicians who are facilitating a genocide and the journalists who provide them with ideological cover. By this logic, it isn’t clear why ordinary people should be allowed to vote: is it really for the little people to take a position on a question as complicated as who should govern them and how?
The powerful tend not to be explicitly opposed to democracy. Instead, the task is to manage things so that elections produce the right outcomes and don’t change anything that matters. One of the main ways to do this is to make sure that the people hear and see only the right things, so that when they go to the polls they can be trusted to tick the right boxes and go back to sleep for another four or five years. And this in turn requires that the right people maintain control of the means of mental production. This goes well beyond Kraft, or what he decides to do with his stadium. Most British newspapers are owned by a handful of billionaires, yet nobody asks if it’s right for billionaires to be taking positions on complicated political issues.
The judgment of ordinary people is far from infallible. The popularity of Ed Sheeran’s truly awful music is testament to that (there is such a thing as good bad pop: this is not it). But on the ‘difficult, complicated’ issue of what Israel is doing in Palestine, the judgment of the general populations of many countries has been far sounder than their leaders’. Those in positions of power have gone to great lengths – from smearing dissent to criminalising it – to change this state of affairs, but to no avail. For defenders of Israel, the fact that even Ed Sheeran fans can see the situation for what it is can only be bad news.
