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Macklemore x Ed Sheeran concert: politics cannot be ignored
Ed Sheeran (everyone's favorite dreamy male singer) is holding a big tour across North and South America. Macklemore (everyone's favorite white rapper) got kicked out after (in an earlier concert) saying "Free Palestine", playing a song with pro-Palestine lyrics, and this:
Ed Sheeran has defended himself, saying it was not his decision - indeed, one Robert Kraft graciously confirmed he coordinated venues to boycott Macklemore - though Sheeran also remarked he tries to avoid politics in general:
So far, four other performers have dropped in solidarity with Macklemore.
Interestingly, Gillette stadium which banned Macklemore is hosting Kanye West, yes, the guy who was praising Hitler a year ago (albeit later admitting mental illness).
What do you think?
First, let me address the elephant in the room: the music industry is a corrupt dumpsterfire, basically a cartel. This is what cartels do. Besides dropping his pro-Palestine friend, Sheeran must also accept Ticketmaster price-gouging attendees, limited tour dates (I overheard somewhere there used to be far more concerts), and other nonsense. He probably could just find more accomodating venues if every one wasn't owned by Live Nation.
Lots of people are discussing how politics can't be avoided, and they're right. This is an excellent case study of how the endgame of "politics" convolutes everything and makes everyone miserable. Everyone loses here: Macklemore for taking a mild pro-Palestine stance gets kicked out of venues and attacked by Palestine opposers, Sheeran for taking a pro-peace neutral stance gets his tour lineup wrecked and attacked by Palestine supporters. There is nothing these performers can do, even be completely silent, that won't get them attacked by some group.
But the other side of "every side gets you attacked" is that no side is truly best. With no obvious winning strategy, you can be truer to yourself. And as Macklemore says:
Less tyrannical cartels, more people able to say what they want and go home to their families (with careers, money, opportunity, safety, and audiences)...I can defend these by linking them to other axioms, but ultimately they just seem right to me. I think celebrities should express their politics (including neutrality), for authenticity, and moreso because they can: it widens the Overton Window as they avoid life-ruining consequences. Even Kanye and his edgy schizo-manifestations, which I (unsuprisingly) strongly disagree with, but don't hate and even sort of appreciate for some odd reason. Yes my thinking is flawed, but look, his "cancellation" gave him the Streisand effect and today he performs where even Macklemore cannot, so what is flawless?
(Also, holy shit, can news sites link to their actual sources instead of writing articles whose sole content is paraphrasing them? Credit to variety.com of all outlets, the one article I found that did, albeit in the middle.)
I’m personally opposed for several reasons.
First of all, once partisan politics invades a space, it becomes the primary point of that space. That’s what happened to Hollywood and music. You are almost required to have the “right” opinions on various topics to gain access to an audience. Not a liberal or even not outspoken enough about your liberalism — you are cut off from a lot of mainstream culture making. That means that you cannot be neutral or even ignore the topics. The same tends to happen even in amateur culture spaces. Once the topic of politics is discussed, the forum will become mostly political and will develop a strong political orthodoxy even if dissent is tolerated. Even here, the main topic of conversation is political discussion, and we have a pretty strong consensus of political conservatism. Not that other ideas are not discussed or there aren’t people who disagree on that consensus, but they’re generally heretics.
Second, it tends to destroy the art in question. It means that instead of creating an authentic, true to life story or song. It must serve the purpose of the person’s political ideology. An atheistic socialist writing a character who is not like them cannot help but make them in some way loathe some. Yesteryear was about a conservative Christian rancher who ends up completely off grid, but every conservative and every Christian in that story (except for a gay friendly pastor mentioned at the end) was a hypocritical, mean, loathe some character, they never really seemed to believe in God as areal living faith, and the same is true of “the manosphere “ and a conservative presidential campaign. The upshot is that the liberal and feminist author just couldn’t create believable Christian or conservative characters.
Third, it tends to turn those art forms and venues into partisan places. It’s no longer a place for everyone, instead the project tends to welcome orthodox people and shun heretics. If you’re a conservative Jew forced to listen to every musician scream about the Palestinian Genocide, you obviously are not feeling all that welcome. Nor are Christians or conservatives forced to listen as those same people scream about liberal causes like abortion. This leads to self-segregation where people tend to curate their music and other art to types of art that’s at least not hostile to them. This reduces places where all people can share a bit of culture. I can still attend most sporting events without feeling like the venue and the players are hostile to me as a fairly conservative Christian. I don’t see that as much in art and music.
This is a good point.
But from someone who's maybe generally seen as neutral (at least tolerant): even neutrality and "non-political" is a political position. If you make a space non-political, you alienate the political members and kick out those who can't restrain themselves, just like how if they make a space political they alienate you and kick you out if you can't fake adhere to them. Your position is (subjectively) more reasonable because it allows silence, but I still feel for the people who get kicked or voluntarily leave for being political; from firsthand experience many of them are very kind and talented (such that to me, their politics is a personality flaw, nobody's perfect), so it would be nice to accommodate them somehow.
Case in point here, except I hesitate to call Macklemore talented, but the consequence to enforcing neutrality isn't that he complies, instead he doesn't play at all. Maybe even if they asked him to tone his rhetoric and gave him a second chance, judging by his later remarks. And if you want examples of very political musicians who are widely regarded as good, look at Jazz, Punk, and Rock icons.
I think the real problem is centralization. In this case, because every big venue is basically in one monopoly, Ed Sheeran (who claims he'd keep Macklemore if it was his decision) can't change venues or threaten to. In the case of Hollywood (and academia and, honestly, most institutions) the problem is that there’s one status quo. The more neutral solution that would allow more members wouldn't be to make an institution's status quo non-political, but to create multiple institutions with different cultures, so (almost) everyone has some group that accepts them.
How do we prevent these groups from merging or the most outspoken politics from dominating them all? I don't know, although I think tone policing like here helps a lot. Also people with the security to expressing (while not imposing) unorthodox views, may normalize and spread this ability, for even the presently orthodox to prevent it from becoming narrower and/or corrupted. Regardless, it's the same problem as preventing a neutral organization from becoming partisan, but almost strictly easier, because we get multiple tries.
Well, not really, at least not in my view. Non-political used to be the default on almost everything. Stores didn’t go out of their way to support political causes, made up political holidays, or anything along those lines. Sports used to be just games, music used to be just entertainment and movies were just movies. There wasn’t a need to trumpet your opinions on stage or curate your stock of items in a store. You didn’t have to post signage Celebrating gay, trans, obscure religious holidays, or racial history months. It was … just a store. Just songs. Just a story. Just baseball. And it wasn’t alienating to political people, it was creating a space where people could be together with people who they might disagree with politically. Where they didn’t have to be on guard lest someone find out they were political heretics. You can’t even just go to work and just work without the need to be careful about what you say out loud or what you refrain from saying that reveals you as a heretic. It doesn’t have to be that way. It wasn’t always that way, in fact for much of American history, politics wasn’t even discussed in public. You just didn’t know how someone voted or their beliefs.
This is a statement of an ideal, but it doesn't always work out that way in practice. Particularly in America, people expect to see certain patriotic (and occasionally religious) observances which they see as non-political, but other people see as political. And in many such cases this ambiguity was created deliberately for political purposes.
To take an example that is now sufficiently out-of-date that it doesn't matter any more, the people who normalised the flying of the POW-MIA flag alongside the US flag intended to make a political point by doing so - namely that the US should not normalise the relationship with (notionally communist but, like China, not particularly USSR-aligned) Vietnam until Vietnam did more to ensure the return of Vietnam War POWs and MIAs. But in the current year, someone who said that flying the POW-MIA flag was an anti-Vietnamese statement would attract funny looks.
"Under God" in the pledge of allegiance has a similar history. The conservatives who amended Bellamy's original pledge to add "under God" in 1954 were making a political point about American Christianity vs Soviet atheism. But Michael Newdow was widely attacked (and probably justifiably so) for making the pledge unnecessarily political in 2002.
In contrast, singing the national anthem before football games really was non-politically patriotic in an uncomplicated way until Colin Caepernik messed things up to make his political point. [That isn't a fact of live, it's a statement about American politics at a specific time. Singing the Spanish national anthem at the start of a Barcelona-Real Madrid or God Save the Queen at a Rangers-Celtic match would start a fight]
You can see a similar argument with e.g. confederate symbols in State flags, explicitly Christian Christmas decorations in quasi-public buildings, and Donald Trump making a partisan political speech at the White House Easter Egg Hunt. Scott Alexander had an excellent blog post built around the idea that flying the pride flag in San Francisco is no more or less political than flying the stars and stripes in Peoria.
Was St Patrick's Day a "made up political holiday" and if so when did it stop being one? Celebrating it was controversial back in the day when assimilation of white ethnic immigrants was a live political issue.
Sports are an expression of local identity, and if that wasn't political in mid-20th century America that was a highly contingent fact about history. A Bowl game between Ole Miss and Notre Dame would have been at least as political as the Old Firm derby if such a thing had happened in the 1880s.
I am trying to think of a time when music wasn't commonly political and/or religious, and I'm coming up blank. Both sides of the aisle thought that rock music was political back when it was controversial.
The first feature-length film ever made was, by some definitions, Birth of a Nation. So movies were frequently political, and sometimes explicitly so, from the start.
The answer is that after there wasn't any more discrimination against Irish, they didn't shut down the St. Patrick's Day parade or repurpose it to be about all countries that start with the letter "I", and at that point it was no longer political.
If 50 years later the anti-Israel movement started complaining about the St. Patricks Day Parade (without it actually changing) because being about the Irish normalizes dealing with countries that start with the letter "I", that wouldn't suddenly make it political again.
Movies were political. But being political wasn't required procedure. They made political movies, but they made nonpolitical movies too.
The whole reason we have "this isn't political, this is just decency" is that people know very well that it was the norm to limit your politics, and that they are trying to find a way to evade this norm.
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