Macklemore Kicked Off Ed Sheeran Tour for Pro-Palestine Comments

Ed Sheeran has booted Macklemore from his U.S. tour after venues threatened to cancel shows over the rapper’s pro-Palestine comments, Macklemore said in a statement. Macklemore also accused Robert Kraft, who owns Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts, of threatening to pull Sheeran’s concert if the rapper was not removed as a support act. Kraft rallied the owners of the other tour venues to follow suit, according to Macklemore, prompting Sheeran’s team and Messina Touring Group to kick him off the bill.“Ed was in a fucked up position,” Macklemore wrote of his longtime friend and “brother,” adding that they had spoken multiple times about the matter on the phone. “He knew it. His typical apolitical stance was being challenged in a way it never had been before.” Sheeran told Macklemore that people objected to the phrase “Free Palestine,” uttered during the rapper’s two prior support dates on the tour. (That and other comments irked, among others, Pink, who said, at the center of her own subsequent firestorm, “What I need is to be able to say, as a Jewish mom, ‘that scared me, and it scared people I love.’”) Macklemore, in his telling, responded to Sheeran that those words should not be “...