If You Just Did What We Wanted, There'd Be No Problems

Nesrine Malik decides to give her take on the Ed Sheeren concert affair and once again, says the quiet bit out loud:

A form of disciplining is dispensed. Please, Mr or Miss Moneybags, with your preening notions that you have anything intelligent or informed to say about immigration policy or Palestine. Stick to football. Stick to pop music. Stick to acting. Stick to children’s shows.

Yes, please just do what you’re paid to do - act, sing, write, paint. Indulge your obsession in private. 

The horror of Gaza has broken the art world, roiled Hollywood, fractured literary institutions. And still, as Ed Sheeran stands alone on stage following the withdrawal of all his support acts (in solidarity with Macklemore, who was removed from the tour due to a pro-Palestinian speech), he told his audience that he wants his music to be “about unity, not division”.

The speed at which his tour unravelled is not evidence of the incompatibility of music and politics, necessitating that they remain separate to avoid that “division”. It is a study in how it is becoming increasingly unnatural to separate them.

His tour hasn’t ’unravelled’ at all of course, no one was buying a ticket to see some unknown support artists…

The enmeshment of entertainment and politics is organic and part of many conflicts and political outrages in recent memory. Vietnam, South Africa, Darfur – all had a cohort of celebrities involved in objecting, lobbying and raising awareness. Figures such as Macklemore or Gary Lineker or Mark Ruffalo or Ms Rachel (who? Wll,  she's an Amerucan educator on YouTube you wouldn't want anywhere near your kids in real life ) are not breaking with convention and plunging industries into turmoil and controversy, but partaking in a long legacy of activism that includes, to name a few, Nina Simone, Donald Sutherland, Kurt Vonnegut, Marlon Brando, Mia Farrow, George Michael and George Clooney.

You can disagree with the stances they have taken. But the belief that they are somehow not qualified to take and express them, and that art and entertainment are sacrosanct, is ignorant at best, disingenuous at worst.

No it isn’t, if I buy a ticket for a pop concert that’s what I expect to get, not a jumped up fluffer hectoring me about a non-existent genocide. 

Public figures are people who have the same passions that everybody else has, and they have politics that they wish to advance with the tools at their disposal.

They can do it on their own time, not when someone's paying them to do something else. 

And I suspect the reason they are met with such belittlement and outrage by their opponents is that there is an understanding that once politics spills over into entertainment, an uncontainable sort of trouble starts.

Once politics enters that relationship, it becomes ungovernable. It can move the parameters of public opinion and discourse in ways that are hard to mediate, so direct is the relationship between the artists and their audience.

Only fools and children treat the words of 'celebrities' protected by their wealth from the consequences of the cause they champion as gospel.

But when artists’ politics clashes with powerful sponsors, as it did when Gillette Stadium owner Robert Kraft removed Macklemore from the Sheeran lineup, it all becomes less straightforward, so complicated, so bedevilled by nuance that could not possibly be litigated adequately by dilettantes.

These collisions are an automatic feature of societies in which politics is failing. The outrage in Palestine is roiling culture because it has been so smothered in politics, because the pain and fury resulting from what the world is witnessing has not been appropriately channelled or responded to by a representative leadership – in fact, it has been policed and criminalised.

Yes, she really said it: 'Celebrities will shut up about this when politicians do what we tell them regardless of the voters' wishes!' 

A healthy political culture should view these spillovers not as crude transgressions into private spaces of consumption, but democracy by other means, because electoral democracy has not squared up to the task.

The problem is not the outspoken artists and entertainers; the problem is what they are speaking about. I wish that the enduring agony of Palestinians were not litigated by the sound and fury and discursive froth of high entertainment, but this is where the politics has brought us. If you want to leave politics out of it, then demand that the politics do the work.

I demand my politician focus on my country, not one inhabited by whinging Muslims, Nesrine!