Macklemore performs at St Anne's Park on June 4, 2025, in Dublin, Ireland. Redferns See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Post on Google The rapper Macklemore, who is to music what frozen TV dinners are to food, has now been booted as Ed Sheeran’s opening act.
Preening in front of tens of thousands of people who paid to see the genuinely talented Sheeran play New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium the other week, Macklemore devoted most of his set to prattling about Gaza, ululating about Palestine, and praising the terrorist sympathizers on American college campuses.
It was a relatively tame performance by Macklemore’s standards: He’s famous for putting on a large prosthetic nose and dancing around like a caricature right out of Der Stürmer.
But it was enough for Sheeran’s tour promoter to inform the provocateur that his services would no longer be needed.
Sheeran’s other opening acts, Finneas, Lukas Graham and Aaron Rowe, have since dropped out as well in solidarity.
Given the fact that the four openers combined have enough star power and talent to light up a ticket booth on the New Jersey Turnpike, it’s tempting to ignore the whole kerfuffle, or laugh it off as yet another case of very minor artists suffering from very major delusions of self-importance.
But l’affaire Macklemore teaches us two important lessons that mustn’t be ignored.
The first, and obvious one, is this: What goes around, comes around.
Macklemore has spent the last several years repeatedly and shrilly calling on artists to boycott Israel.
He even wrote a song, “Hind’s Hall,” dedicated to championing the BDS movement, which promotes sanctions against the Jewish state.
And now that he’s received a taste of his own medicine, he’s crying foul and claiming to be a victim.
He’s anything but. He’s simply a morally and intellectually unserious man-child learning the basic principle most of us grasp in kindergarten: The rules are the same for everyone.
And if the rule you support, the culture you help create, calls for canceling those whose opinions you don’t like, don’t be surprised if you too are canceled one day.
The same goes for that other simpleton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a career-long BDS fangirl who’s now accusing Macklemore’s critics of a sinister attack on the First Amendment.
There is, however, a much deeper lesson here, and it has to do with entertainment itself.
Once upon a time, not too long ago, the performers we hailed were the ones who could actually, you know, do something: sing, dance, act and move us with their art.
These days, our entertainers are delivering performances of a different kind — not creative but destructive.
Think about it: Ed Sheeran’s previous tour, which concluded in 2025, grossed more than $875 million, with 8.8 million people buying tickets to enjoy his music.
The current tour is doing brisk business as well, generating, according to reports, about $7 million per show.
Macklemore had no problem jeopardizing all that: His silly antics put Sheeran at risk of losing tens of millions of dollars, after several venues announced they wouldn’t welcome the tour as long as the rapper was on the bill.
Like other preening pro-Palestine provocateurs — the odious Ms. Rachel comes to mind — Macklemore’s true art isn’t coming up with inspired content that moves millions.
It’s stirring up cheap controversy by trying to cower others into submission.
It’s a very good strategy for mediocre entertainers, who can get famous quick by pretending to be great moral crusaders and plugging into hot-button political issues they barely understand.
But it’s terrible for everyone else, and for art at large, because it hijacks truth and beauty and turns every aspect of life into an ugly, muddy political battlefield.
Good riddance to bad art: At least now we can enjoy a few good Ed Sheeran tunes without the self-serving mewling of morons like Macklemore.
Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
