It must have come as a surprise to Ed Sheeran when all of his support acts withdrew from the remainder of the US leg of his tour. The American rapper Macklemore had triggered the walkout when he gave an impassioned speech calling for a “free Palestine” on stage and was dropped for doing so. The decision by the remaining acts to drop out in solidarity exposed a deep divide in the modern music industry. Some artists still insist on keeping politics out of music, while others expect music to speak to our perilous times.

After he was dropped, Macklemore wrote that Sheeran’s “typical apolitical stance was being challenged in a way it never had been before”, to which Sheeran responded: “I am not complicit” and “those who come to my shows do not expect a political forum”.

I think that the concept of expectation is worth probing. The idea that artists should make their political sentiments known is often dismissed as a parasocial delusion, one particularly rampant among young people on social media who “call out” musicians for their silence (indeed, young people are far more likely to be in favour of musicians using their concerts to make political statements). Artists aren’t politicians, the criticism goes, and to consider them as such distracts from, even compromises, the purpose of art as a forum for personal expression and of escapism. In other words, why not just enjoy the music instead of expecting activism from musicians, too?

The problem with that idea is that it treats a separation of art and politics as natural rather than something determined by historical convention. It wasn’t so long ago that expectations were quite different. There used to be a neater division between countercultural........

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