Ed Sheeran’s Art & Monopoly Blues Extravaganza

Ed Sheeran (left) and Macklemore, collage from the L.A. Times

Everything I’ve learned about the Macklemore/Ed Sheeran controversy currently sweeping fan communities, I’ve learned involuntarily. Yet watching the blowback has forced me to consider art’s role in today’s late capitalist hellscape, and what relationship pure art has to commerce. Sheeran bowed to commercial pressures to silence Macklemore, and his own retinue has responded by dropping him completely, leaving him unsupported during a multimillion-dollar tour.

For readers from either the future or a comfortable cultural distance, American rapper Macklemore has been among the opening acts on Sheeran’s Loop Tour. Other opening acts include Vance Joy, Sigrid, and Lukas Graham. Last week, before a sold-out crowd in East Rutherford, New Jersey, Macklemore waved a Palestinian flag and shouted, “Free Palestine.” These actions shouldn’t be controversial; the Israeli state’s continued Gaza war remains deeply unpopular with Sheeran’s young audience demographic.

In response, a consortium of venue owners, led by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, announced they’d rather cancel Sheeran’s scheduled concerts, than give Macklemore a platform. Sheeran, who strives to remain apolitical, removed Macklemore from the line-up. This silencing angered not only fans, but also fellow artists; all Sheeran’s supporting acts, including one of two backing bands, quit the tour, leaving hundreds of thousands of presold tickets in limbo.

Much popular response has focused on Macklemore and Sheeran as artists. What responsibility do musicians, especially touring musicians playing to packed stadiums, owe to hot-button current events? Has Sheeran, in refusing to pick a side, tacitly sided with abusive power systems? These questions matter (and are, I think, less contested than philosophy classes might imply). But they ignore that Ed Sheeran isn’t only an artist, he’s also a business.

Like most musicians, even highly successful acts with major labels, Sheeran’s recordings barely break even, under contract terms. He makes most of his money through touring, personal appearances, and licensing. This means that, to get paid, he must perform. Critics might say that Sheeran should stand on principle and refuse Kraft’s demands, but rent and utilities come due eventually, even for celebrities. Sheeran, like anybody, deserves an income.

But it isn’t Sheeran alone. He, and his supporting acts, are merely the public face of an enterprice that involves countless technicians, roadies, set builders and prop managers, accountants, publicity managers, marketing experts, and press agents. Factor in the thousands of site employees, vendors, machine operators, parking attendants, security guards, and others who keep stadium venues operational. Thousands of livelihoods are at stake nightly.

Ask whatever you will about what obligations Sheeran owes to artistic integrity and current events. No matter your answer, stadium performances are massive economic enterprises that circulate money both locally and globally. Sheeran might lose something if he stands on principle, but he also risks the incomes of countless hourly wage-earners in some of America’s most expensive cities. He has the power to kick poor laborers’ rent into massive arrears.

So Ed Sheeran is a capitalist enterprise, okay; but so is Robert Kraft. Rock stars vastly outnumber stadium owners. According to Macklemore, Kraft’s threats were bolstered by venue owners in several American cities, who threatened to collude to submarine the Loop Tour. This traces the classic Marxist question of who controls the market, management or labor. Put in modern capitalist terms, does the supply side or the demand side control the economy?

If Sheeran withholds his labor, he pinches his workers’ pockets, but Kraft et al. can hold their breath and survive. If stadium owners withhold their venues, Sheeran’s enterprise has no revenue, which hurts workers more. Without these concerts, massive swaths of economic development stop immediately. And Sheeran is one of the few individuals capable of switching the development engine off and on.

I don’t know Sheeran’s thinking, nor whether the innumerable paychecks tied to his performances affected his calculations. He cannot possibly know most of the laborers down his hierarchy, much less care. Yet I have difficulty imagining that he didn’t at least momentarily think about the strangers who would stand idle, without a paycheck. If nothing else, he must know, and innately trust, his microphone technicians and light operators.

Rock stars and other celebrities necessarily choose public life, subject to constant scrutiny. (And it sometimes breaks them.) But their public profile absolutely demands anonymous water carriers whose unrecognized work makes the stars’ careers possible. Telling Ed Sheeran to eat his concert proceeds for artistic integrity sounds uplifting when splashed across social media, but Sheeran serves two masters. Artistic integrity withers when confronted with economic integrity, especially for the rich.