Growing Up

For a decade, I have been telling you that we all knew what colour a snowflake was, and that “cancel culture” was only given a name at all when it started happening to the people who had been practising it since time immemorial. As Kenan Malik now writes:

For many on the right, “cancel culture” is a terrible thing – unless it becomes necessary to cancel views they deem unfit for public consumption. Step forward Macklemore, the US rapper brusquely evicted from Ed Sheeran’s US tour.

Macklemore is well known for his political songs. In 2012, his hit Same Love celebrated gay marriage and took aim at hip-hop’s homophobia. Two years ago, he released Hind’s Hall, in support of Columbia University students who organised pro-Palestinian protests and renamed the hall they occupied in honour of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old girl killed by Israeli forces in distressing circumstances.

The opening act for Sheeran at New Jersey’s MetLife stadium, Macklemore introduced Hind’s Hall with a two-minute speech demanding a “Free Palestine”. It was greeted with applause in the stadium but generated outrage outside. Robert Kraft, owner of the Gillette stadium near Boston, where Sheeran and Macklemore were due to play, and a close friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, fronted a campaign for venues to cancel the rapper.

The Israeli American Council organised a petition insisting that “Macklemore has the right to hold political views” but “the line should be drawn when an opening act uses a global concert platform to advance a one-sided political agenda”. The idea that Macklemore has the right to express his views to a small audience but not to a large one, and only if he carefully delineates all sides of a debate, is, frankly, absurd. The right to free speech is predicated neither on the size of one’s audience nor on the nuance of one’s take.

Interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme, IAC’s chief executive Elan Carr claimed the phrase “Free Palestine” was a call “for the extermination of the state of Israel and the Jewish people”. There are certainly antisemites within the pro-Palestinian movement, and some who would like to exterminate Jews. What Carr is seeking to do, though, in common with many supporters of Israel, is delegitimise any call for Palestinian freedom or a Palestinian state, or even for full rights for Palestinians in an Israeli state whose Basic Law reserves the “right of self-determination” solely for Jews.

Carr claimed also that Macklemore had “hijacked” the stage. Macklemore and Sheeran are friends, the two having collaborated on Growing Up, a song about the rapper’s newborn daughter. Macklemore’s views and repertoire would have been well known to Sheeran and to promoters. He was not engaged to sing My Favourite Things.

Others argue that the issue is not what Macklemore said on stage but his previous antisemitism. This refers largely to a performance in 2014 in which Macklemore sported a black wig, beard and a huge fake hooked nose – the classic antisemitic caricature of a Jew. The Anti-Defamation League accepted his subsequent apology and his claim that the costume was not intentionally antisemitic, a claim which, in truth, was not very convincing.

Many have pointed out that Macklemore’s outfit was no more acceptable than if he had worn a blackface costume, which is true. Yet, celebrities from David Baddiel to Jimmy Fallon have worn blackface and not been cancelled. We should not ignore Macklemore’s grotesquely antisemitic costume, or what it might say about his views, but neither should we wield it as reason for cancellation, especially a decade later.

At least two stadia that have banned Macklemore – the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, and the Raymond James stadium in Tampa, Florida – have been willing to host Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, who last year released a song called Heil Hitler, promoting it with $20 T-shirts emblazoned with a black swastika. The objection to Macklemore seems less about antisemitism than about his criticism of Israel.

Critics point out also that owners of stadia (like publishers of books) have the legal right to exclude people they don’t wish to platform. Few would deny that. The issue, rather, is that such cancelling has become today a major means of policing speech – as the Macklemore case reveals.

Spectator columnist Stephen Daisley mocked the left for being “suddenly, and unusually, vocal about freedom of speech” in the wake of Macklemore’s cancellation. Equally, though, many on the right have been unusually silent about it (Daisley himself, to be fair, opposed Macklemore’s ousting).

The Free Speech Union, normally thunderously supportive of free expression, could not bring itself to oppose Macklemore’s cancellation, but only feebly ask how far owners or promoters should “dictate what an artist can or cannot say on stage?” It was, however, “alarmed” by the “cancellation” of Sheeran for not holding “the ‘correct’ opinions strongly enough”. Gad Saad, a Canadian academic popular on the reactionary right for his acerbic hostility to immigrants and Muslims, and who coined the term “suicidal empathy”, defended Ye’s right “to be an idiot” but appeared to endorse Macklemore’s cancellation. Some have even likened Macklemore’s performance to a “neo-Nuremberg rally”.

Rightwing cancel culture is not new. Two decades ago, the country band Dixie Chicks faced a furious backlash for opposing the Iraq War and telling an audience, “We’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” Thousands of radio stations banned them and DJs were suspended for playing their songs. For conservatives, this was not censorship but patriotism. The policing of speech always comes armed with its own excuses.

Cancel culture is usually seen as the product of “woke” activists wielding power in the culture industries. What the Macklemore case exposes is that those with economic power are even more able to police speech. They should be fiercely resisted.