In an Instagram post shared today, Macklemore writes that after weeks of trying to get this organized, nine venues have explicitly turned him down. Four of them are in New York City or the metropolitan area—Madison Square Garden, the Barclays Center, the Prudential Center, and the UBS Arena—along with the Los Angeles-area venues the Kia Forum, the Crypto.com Arena, and the Intuit Dome, plus San Francisco’s Chase Center and the Climate Pledge Arena in Macklemore’s hometown of Seattle.
“By mid-September, we received available dates at these arenas through the end of the year. But once they found out these were my benefit shows for Palestine, those dates were suddenly off the table. The doors were closed. The conversations were all different, but the result was the same. The shows were not going to be allowed to happen in these venues,” he writes. “In over twenty years of touring, I’ve never experienced anything like this.” He adds, “I’d rather lose every opportunity in this industry than spend another day protecting people who value their business relationships with Israel more than they value Palestinian human life.”
That Macklemore would have trouble with this isn’t especially surprising given that the main party responsible for getting him booted from Ed Sheeran’s tour was Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium. Not only did Kraft prevent Macklemore from performing at Gillette, but was said to have rallied other stadium owners to apply more pressure to get the rapper removed from the tour. Meanwhile, Macklemore’s Free Palestine dates in Europe sold out almost immediately.
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