Macklemore will no longer be performing as the opening act for Ed Sheeran on his ongoing US tour, after the rapper made headlines with a number of his pro-Palestine comments.
On Monday afternoon, a spokesperson for Ed’s current tour, Messina Touring Group, told Rolling Stone: “As the concert promoter for Ed Sheeran’s U.S. Loop Tour, we have been notified by venues on the upcoming US tour dates that they will not allow a concert to take place with Macklemore on the line-up, which would result in the cancellation of the tour and impact hundreds of thousands of fans.
“After discussions with stakeholders, Macklemore will not be performing on the remaining support dates.”
During his sets earlier on in Ed’s tour, Macklemore declared “free Palestine” from the stage, expressed solidarity with the people of Gaza amid the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and showed images conveying the damage in Gaza on screen.
“A big part of the reason why I wanted to do this tour in the first place is so I could stand up in stadiums like this and say two words that are very near and dear to my heart: ‘free Palestine’,” he said on stage while performing in New Jersey earlier this month. “I said, ‘free Palestine!’.
“I want those words to be loud and clear, so that people all the way in Gaza to the occupied West Bank know that we have not forgotten about them.”
Following this, a petition was set up calling for Macklemore’s removal from the tour by the Israeli American Council.
HuffPost UK has contacted representatives for both Macklemore and Ed Sheeran for comment.
One of Macklemore’s most vocal critics since his on stage comments in support of Palestine have begun making headlines is the singer Pink.
In the days that followed, she reposted an image on Instagram alleging that the Thrift Shop rapper had used the concert to spew “anti-Israel propaganda”, calling for an apology from Macklemore for what he’d said on stage.
She later issued a lengthier statement on social media, part of which read: “I was in the room at the Grammys in 2014 when Macklemore rapped Same Love and thirty-three couples, gay and straight, got married to it, and I cheered, no questions asked.
“Four months later Macklemore put on a hooked nose, a black beard and a bowl cut, performed in it, and called it a ‘random costume’. Every Jew I know knew exactly what it was. The same love, it turned out, had a guest list, and we weren’t on it. But he apologised, and I let it go, because that’s what we do. We let it go.
“Then last weekend he stood in front of a stadium full of music-loving families, with violent images from a war on the screens, dedicated a song to the movement of his choice, and then took the mic to tell all of the Jews in the stadium that it wasn’t about them. You don’t get to decide that for us. That’s what prompted my repost. Not ‘Free Palestine’, and not anyone’s right to say it.
“I have never asked for another artist to be silenced and I’m not asking now. I don’t need anyone fired, and I don’t need a refund. What I need is to be able to say, as a Jewish mum, ‘that scared me, and it scared people I love’, without being told our fear is just propaganda, and without being told I’m somehow cool with genocide because I noticed?”
