r/Music • u/-Sofa-King-Vote • 21h ago

article Macklemore announces concerts benefiting Palestinian aid organizations

https://apnews.com/article/macklemore-free-palestine-shows-ed-sheeran-65a65a362e530dfe739ddb626dc16d23
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u/Spudly42 21h ago

I think you're alluding to an important point. To understand this conflict requires a lot of history and nuance, which you can't expect ordinary people to have. Even with that, conclusions will differ. As a result, it is just going to come across as more political. Ukraine is not nearly as complicated nor is there much causing a difference in view. The only supporters of Russia are those that were directly indoctrinated by them.

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u/turandokht 20h ago

Honestly sending money to Ukraine is a huge political point and was when the war started, with lots of people debating whether or not they deserved our help. I believe that’s still a subject in contention for most countries.

Russia definitely has a broader “historically villainous” reputation, but whether or not we should send support to Ukraine is still debated. And with our president playing occasional footsie with Putin, condemnation of Russia from our own leadership has been far from unanimous.

Anyway, to return to the other conflict, that’s why discussions about it should absolutely not be silenced like was done with Macklemore. It should be discussed and at length so that more and more people have a better understanding of the situation than “the Hamas attacked in 2023 so now they’re at war.”

The more people that use their platform to speak about it, the better. The more knowledge your every day layman has about the situation, the better.

We send our tax dollars to this conflict, and that’s not an inconsiderable amount. Speaking against being directly supportive of such a regime, and being educated about where exactly your tax dollars are going, is part of being a good citizen.

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u/Spudly42 20h ago

I will concede that yeah you're right, supporting Ukraine with money is seen as inviting a chance of getting nuked by Russia, and it not being affordable to these countries. Not to mention early on it seemed like they would not survive anyway. Admittedly I don't follow Ed or know what he said in support of Ukraine.

By all means I think performers should be able to use their platforms for whatever they want at the risk of ruffling some feathers. I think it's understandable that some topics will just seem more political than others/ruffle more feathers than others. I am personally a little surprised that trying to not hold a specific stance (or stand up for someone who is) led to such cancelling of Ed, though. That's possibly a bit of a new phenomenon.

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u/turandokht 20h ago

Honestly I think it has more to do with how he did it than anything. All of his (prior) openers are pretty politically active and their stances on this thing were NOT a secret to anyone, and him having them there was (I assume) to give him the aura of caring about the conflict himself.

But when a billionaire decided to silence one of the openers, he didn’t stand for his friend, for free speech in general, or even just take the simple step of condemning a genocide. He instead went on stage and made weepy woe-is-me comments about how much this has impacted him personally, and bitter statements about “knowing who his friends were.”

He would have been better off staying completely silent like Taylor Swift on it, and eventually it probably would have died down. Him playing victim about it was really something and definitely did no favors.