I was in my favorite cigar bar the other day and a conversation developed around not watching sports, or going to movies, or watching streaming TV involving actors, entertainers, or themes the one might not agree with either socially, politically, or religiously. I mentioned I routinely will stop watching shows, stop shopping at certain establishments, stop buying products, stop listening to music of anyone who has anti-American, left wing, radical liberal leanings. One example would be my decision to delete all my Ed Sheeran music from my Apple Library and vow never to ever buy a ticket to see him live based upon his pro Gaza statement at his concert.
I don’t believe I should allow myself to be subject to people who use their fame to advance politics I reject. I am applying the same rule everyone else already uses.
As above, my friend tells me that I can disagree with an artist’s politics and still buy the ticket, stream the catalog, shop the brand. That sounds generous. It is actually a demand that MY money stay politically neutered while their platform does not.
That is not sophistication. It is a one-way rule.
Patronage is not a private aesthetic act
When I stream a song or buy a concert ticket I are not only consuming a melody. I am sending royalties, raising an artist’s commercial value, and helping venues and labels treat that person as a safe bet. The artist then uses that platform—on stage, in interviews, in social posts—to talk about Gaza, America, elections, or whatever else they have decided is “humanitarian” rather than political.
Ed Sheeran is the current example. After dropping Macklemore from his tour over onstage “Free Palestine” remarks, Sheeran took the Philadelphia stage and said he could no longer hide how he felt: October 7 was “horrific,” but what is happening in Gaza is “catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate,” and “systemic injustice” in the West Bank “cannot be overlooked.” (And yet Hamas still fights on. This is war. Unfortunately, innocent people die. Why aren’t of those who truly care ask why Hamas continues to create situations where innocent people die?). He framed it as a humanitarian issue that overrode his usual desire to keep shows about “unity, not division.”
He is entitled to that speech. I am entitled not to underwrite the next one.
Deleting the catalog and refusing the ticket is not a purity ritual. It is declining to fund a man who chose, in a stadium, to turn a concert into a statement I reject. If the statement had gone the other way, many of the same people now calling me small-minded would have already walked.
“Separate the art from the artist” only works when the artist cooperates
The line is popular because it lets people keep the product and discard the person. It collapses the moment the person refuses to stay in the product.
Plenty of musicians never mention Gaza, Israel, America, or elections from the stage. I can enjoy them without subsidizing a lecture. When an artist does inject the lecture, the product and the politics arrive in the same transaction. Pretending otherwise is the actual compartmentalization.
Should I be required to perform that compartmentalization when the artist did not?
The hypocrisy charge runs the wrong direction
The people who tell you to keep consuming while you disagree are rarely consistent about it.
They will drop a brand over an ad, a chicken sandwich, a beer can, a tweet, or a donor. They will demand cultural boycotts of Israeli artists and institutions. They will treat your refusal as uniquely unkind. That is not a principle. That is a preference that their causes get funded and yours do not.
Individual refusal is not “cancel culture.” Cancel culture is institutions, mobs, and employers imposing costs so that someone loses the ability to work. You deleting files from your own library and staying home from a show is the opposite: you are using your own money and attention. No one is owed your wallet.
Markets work because people can walk. If enough people walk, the artist notices. If they don’t, you still kept your own house in order.
You are not deprived
There is more music, more television, more restaurants, and more products than any one person can use. Refusing one catalog does not leave me in cultural poverty. It leaves me with artists who did not decide their show was the right place to announce that Israeli military action is “unjustifiable and disproportionate” while standing in an American stadium.
I can still like the songs I already know. But, I do not have to keep paying for new ones, or for the live version that now comes with a preamble.
Integrity is cheaper than the alternative
The alternative on offer is this: keep the pleasure, mute the meaning, and call it maturity. That is how people end up funding institutions and celebrities they spend the rest of the week criticizing. It feels worldly. It is just lazy.
Everyone already applies this elsewhere. For example, no one would not donate to a PAC they oppose and then claim they “just liked the mailer.” You would not eat at a restaurant whose owner used the dinner service to denounce the country you live in and then insist the food was separate. Music and retail are not magically exempt.
My friend can enjoy whatever he wants. He does not get to redefine my consistency as deprivation. I can disagree with politics and stop writing the checks. That is not hypocrisy. That is the only version of disagreement that costs me something and therefore means something.
