Critical Analysis

Music Is Not Political, Says Political Ed Sheeran

Ed Sheeran sacked Macklemore at the behest of a Zionist mentioned in the Epstein files. The backlash has been swift and brutal, though not as brutal as the genocide in Gaza that Sheeran and his Zionist friends like Kraft pretend is not happening.

Ed Sheeran may be a good musician, I really don’t know as I have only listened to one of his songs from start to finish, Galway Girl, which, for obvious reasons, is the only song I will mention in this article that I will not provide a link to in the footnotes. He sacked Macklemore at the behest of a Zionist mentioned in the Epstein files and thought that was it. How wrong he was. The backlash has been swift and brutal, though not as brutal as the genocide in Gaza that Sheeran and his Zionist friends like Kraft pretend is not happening.

To be clear Kraft appears in the Epstein list and was also charged with solicitation of prostitutes but the video of him with migrant prostitutes was ruled inadmissible and he is a close associate of Donald Trump and to nobody’s surprise Benjamin Nethanyahu.^[1] Sheeran also played at Kraft’s 2022 wedding. Not so squeaky clean.

Sheeran says he just wants to sing, to entertain, to sing love songs and the like. None of it is political he says and his defenders have gone that extra step to say that music shouldn’t be political. Of course, what they mean is that it shouldn’t espouse causes they disagree with, only safe causes that won’t upset the evening tapas and wine soirées in Dublin 4 and posh areas of other cities around the world. And when an event has passed into history, it is very easy to consider the cause safe and sing about it. Not so much when the struggle is going on. Famously, Brian Cowen the former Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) was, after a few pints of Guinness able to give rousing renditions of the Fields of Athenry^[2] at his party’s Ard Fheis (AGM) whilst he prepared to hand over the property deeds of half the country to the IMF, ECB and any vulture fund wishing to make a quick buck or two on the fields in Athenry or even just a backyard in Tallaght. But the “Famine” which the song is about was safe history.

These same people have no problem with musicians being political when they support the cause. They did not complain about Sheeran speaking and performing about Ukraine. But of course, that was different they had the support of NATO, UN, EU, USA, the media, the banks etc. So safe, you could invest in it. And they did. He also met with Noa Argamani following her release by Hamas, but not with Palestinians released in the same period. Sheeran, is a coward, a liar and very political when it suits him and his Zionist backers.^[3] Sheeran went into damage limitation mode at his first concert after sacking Macklemore. He threw in October 7^th, and said what is happening now is unjustifiable, but he didn’t mention who was carrying out the genocide, in fact he didn’t use that word at all. He said it was the most complicated issue in the world, when in fact it is simple: genocide is wrong at all times. He portrayed himself as a victim caught up in a maelstrom not of his own making and again lied that he is never political. He talked of neutrality in the midst of it all. In all it was a self-serving statement that mixed up issues and had little of substance to say.

He also said that he was worried that artists' performance material would have to be preapproved by venues.^[4] But that is exactly what he did. There is a long history of this in the USA, particularly during the McCarthy period but also long after. Sheeran and Kraft just revived the practice. One of the stadiums to ban Macklemore was the Mercedes Benz Stadium in Georgia, a place that once hounded black artists. The car company doesn’t own the stadium, it just has the naming rights, but it is ironic that a stadium in Georgia of all places named after a company that once happily supplied the Nazis with vehicles and made lots of money out of it should not like people complaining about genocide. This is the same state that effectively banned Ray Charles because he refused to play to segregated audiences.

These people are wrong on every level. Not just about Palestine, but about music being neutral. It never has been, though some have tried to excuse Sheeran as not having realised that some shift had taken place in audience’s expectations. Not so. Music has always being political. Woody Guthrie, who inspired Dylan and countless folk singers, famously inscribed This Machine Kills Fascists on his guitar, something which might land him in jail nowadays. Music is a weapon and a battleground and he sang about people’s struggles, from the dustbowl poverty^[5] to the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.^[6]

Acts that are safe politically speaking get promoted and always have. Those musicians who are not safe anymore are cancelled. In some cases they are murdered by the state. The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca is perhaps the most internationally recognised Spanish poet. He was famous in life as a campaigner not only for social causes but for art. He is internationally remembered in part because he was murdered by the Fascists. Victor Jara is perhaps the most famous Chilean singer. He became famous due to his allegiance to the causes of the working class whilst alive and the songs he sang as part of that struggle such as El Derecho de Vivir en Paz^[7] (The Right to Live in Peace) against the war in Vietnam. The lyrics are so relevant to Gaza now.

To all humanity

No Cannon will erase

The furrow of your rice field

The right to live in peace.

The Pinochet dictatorship feared him so much they felt compelled to silence his voice and murdered him only days after the coup. Sheeran need not worry, they will never do that to the likes of him, he is their useful complicit fool.

The world is full of musicians and composers who have been murdered, censored or forced into exile. In the Spanish State we have Catalan musicians such as Lluís Llach who wrote many anti Franco songs such as L’Estaca,^[8] which called for the overthrow of the Fascist dictatorship in Spain. He even recorded one on exile itself, Corrandes d’Exili(Verses on Exile),^[9] or Paco Ibañez who dedicated his life to putting music to the words of countless poets such as Antonio Machado who died in exile, Miguel Hernández who was captured and imprisoned where he died from tuberculosis, García Lorca murdered at the beginning of the Fascist take over and Rafael Alberti who spent 39 years in exile. In Latin America musicians such as Daniel Viglietti also went into exile following his release from prison in Uruguay and Mercedes Sosa fled Argentina. These might seem like they belong to a faraway time, but at the moment Pablo Hasél is in jail in Spain serving a sentence for singing a song critical of the Spanish king, Juan Carlos I.^[10] The song refers to his alcohol abuse, use of prostitutes, trophy hunting of animals in Africa and his plunderering of the Spanish finances. All of Hasél’s statements are factually accurate.^[11] The former Spanish king appointed by the Fascist dictator Franco, is currently on the run in Abu Dhabi, due to his involvement in financial irregularities as they like to put it, whilst Hasél languishes in prison for the crime of insulting the crown.

Sheeran likes to flout his Irish heritage, which at this stage has been reduced at best to his ginger hair. Irish music is full of references to rebellion, from Robert Emmet,^[12] to the Fenians,^[13] the 1916 Rising,^[14] the effects of the great hunger which saw massive migration,^[15] Internment in 1971^[16], Bloody Sunday in 1972, recorded by John Lennon,^[17] the Hunger Strikes^[18] and so forth. Some of it is very political, other songs not so much. You’d think a man who claims to be culturally Irish would know this. But there have always been those who strived to put forward nonsense about music and politics not mixing. Blacks in the US expressed their plight through music, time and again. Whole genres arose due to that and in case Sheeran was in doubt, what does he think the spiritual Oh Freedom^[19] is about? Does he think it is just a pretty tune? Does he think it was sung as part of the civil rights movement in the USA for light entertainment?

Oh freedom, oh freedom

Before I’ll be a slave

I’ll be buried in my grave

Black musicians began refusing to play Jim Crow segregated concerts in the 1950s and 1960s. Even The Beatles at the height of their commercial success before they became more political emulated Ray Charles and refused to play Gator Bowl stadium in 1964 because it was segregated. They stood up to the city and the city backed down. Sheeran has no such backbone, he could regress a few million years in evolutionary terms and we wouldn’t notice the difference.

Pete Seeger put it succinctly in a reworked Methodist Hymn, How Can I Keep from Singing?^[20]

When tyrants tremble, sick with fear

And hear their death-knell ringing

When friends rejoice both far and near

How can I keep from singing?

In prison cell and dungeon vile

Our thoughts to them are winging

When friends by shame are undefiled

How can I keep from singing?

Of course Sheeran’s answer to this, is how can I count my money over the cries and wailing of mothers holding their dead infants in their arms? Put on your headphones and listen to some banal shite on Spotify would seem to be the answer.

There would be no modern folk music without politics, no reggae either nor Ska which was a musical form popular amongst working class Jamaicans.^[21] No Hugh Masekela and South African Jazz without the struggle against Apartheid and of course no Miriam Makeba either. All music is political in nature. Some of the folk songs in the US were composed, by the executed trade union leader Joe Hill, amongst others, to stop the Salvation Army from breaking up trade union meetings. The SA would turn up at meetings with their bands to stop the godless trade unionists from organising the working class. So the IWW (the Wobblies as they were known) composed trade union songs to the same melodies as the reactionary songs of the Salvation Army. As Utah Phillips put it, they took the melodies because they were pretty and changed the lyrics so they made more sense. So when the SA turned up, the trade unionists burst into song and the SA went away, with lucifer’s tale between their legs. One of the songs of that nature is The Preacher and the Slave, also known as Pie in the Sky.^[22]

The point of it all is that music has always been political and Ed “butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth” Sheeran is eminently political. He makes statements about Ukraine because he knows the great and powerful agree with him, he says nothing about Palestine because these same forces are on the side of genocide. He meets with released captives of Hamas but has never met, nor will he ever meet a Palestinian detained as a child with no charge and released many years later as an adult, having never been convicted or even charged with a crime. Sheeran is very political, just like Trump. Stupid, crass, self-serving, egotistical, but political: always political. And like Trump he is always treacherous.

This article was first published on the author's Substack.

^[1] The Independent (18/09/2026) Robert Kraft: The man named in the Epstein files who is behind Ed Sheeran’s concert controversy. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/robert-kraft-epstein-ed-sheeran-macklemore-b3051920.html

^[2] Written by Pete St. John and first recorded by Paddy Reilly see