Naaman Zhou went to a stadium show in Philadelphia and came back with a study of what neutrality costs in pop music now. Ahead of the gig, Ed Sheeran had allowed Macklemore to be removed from the tour for saying “Free Palestine” onstage. Then Sheeran walked out alone and apologized for a week he called the worst of his life.

The chain of events:

  • Macklemore had performed “Hind’s Hall” at two New Jersey shows — named for the Columbia building protesters renamed for Hind Rajab, the five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli soldiers
  • Sheeran’s remaining support acts (Lukas Graham, Aaron Rowe, Finneas) and his backing band, the Irish folk troupe Beoga, all withdrew in solidarity
  • Reportedly Robert Kraft, who owns the Boston stadium on the tour, asked for Macklemore’s removal; Sheeran says the promoter decided
  • Roughly a hundred protesters gathered at a nearby train station, asking it be known as a show of support for Gaza “and not the ‘Ed Sheeran rally’”
  • One man noted the tank shells used in the attack that killed Hind Rajab were made by Day & Zimmermann, a Philadelphia weapons company

The show itself was the argument:

  • Sheeran opened with a teleprompter apology — Gaza is “catastrophic and unjustifiable” — then asked the crowd to stand beside people they disagree with and “agree on singing these songs”
  • During that mea culpa the stadium roared at “humanity, not politics,” drowning out the sentence it completed: “But this is a humanitarian issue.”
  • He replaced Beoga with stand-ins he never named, and where Macklemore’s set had projected images of destruction in Gaza onto the tour’s circular screen, Sheeran showed his own feet on the loop pedals
  • Near the end he apologized for having apologized — the “first bit of the show where it wasn’t about music”
  • The encore opened with “You Need Me, I Don’t Need You,” the song he normally opens with

Zhou is dry about the fans: one disappointed but forgiving, one saying Sheeran “should have grown a set of balls,” two mega-fans approving his apolitical stance — “It takes courage to stand alone in the gap.” His line about the crowd’s appetite for the middle lands at a satirical tweet he had taken as parody: thousands at the centrist rally chanting “Better things aren’t possible.”

And the middle is getting lonelier. Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields festival was built with politics as its purpose; Hayley Williams interpolated “Fuck ICE” and “Free Palestine” into a live song; within twenty-four hours Jack Antonoff and Imagine Dragons had said “Free Palestine” or appeared with a Palestinian flag onstage.

Zhou’s verdict is that the atonement faded as the night went on, and two and a half hours of feel-good Ed Sheeran had mainly made the artist feel better.