Only a few weeks ago, Ed Sheeran was involved in a controversy after he dropped Macklemore as his opening act over “Free Palestine” comments. Sheeran’s backing band and all of his remaining supporting acts quit his tour in solidarity with Macklemore. In the aftermath of this, Sheeran commented that he never wanted to be “an activist musician.” He followed that comment with an explanation that he wants his music to be about “unity and humanity, not politics.” Well, newsflash, Sheeran, you can’t write about unity and humanity without addressing politics.
The interconnection of music and politics is not at all a recent phenomenon. In 1985, at John F. Kennedy Stadium, Joan Baez would open Live Aid with “Amazing Grace” and tell the audience, “This is your Woodstock, and it’s long overdue.” Baez came from an era of musicians who practically defined a genre as an outlet for political and social justice themes. Pete Seeger, Peggy Seeger, Bob Marley, Woody Guthrie and Buffalo Springfield led the way for the Truman Sinclair, MARINA, Mumford & Sons, Hoizer and AURORA of today.
Folk music may be often connected with so-called hippies, activists, environmentalists and feminists, but it’s far from the only genre to spawn political messages. Rock and country are other notable genres that have spawned artist-activists like David Bowie, Queen, Green Day, WILLOW, Johnny Cash, New Radicals, The Chicks, Tyler Childers, Dolly Parton, etc.
You can ignore the messages within the music, but that doesn’t negate their existence.
Likewise, a song can mean something to a listener that the artist didn’t intend, or be used in contexts the artist never imagined. The simple fact is that art is human. Songwriters are human, and so is their audience.
So often music is used to connect people and to share messages the best way a person knows how. Bob Geldof, when asked about the reasoning behind Live Aid, spoke about using the “lingua franca of the planet- which is not English but rock ‘n’ roll” to address an ongoing issue. In a 2025 interview, Truman Sinclair described music as a way to communicate when words fell apart. “I started writing because there were ideas and feelings my friends couldn’t say out loud, and music became the only way to share them,” Sinclair shared with The Line of Best Fit. In 2019, scientists even set out to determine whether music was actually universal. The “Universality and diversity in human song” paper found that music “was indeed part of every culture studied,” and “each culture’s songs for dance, healing, lullaby and love shared similar properties, and listeners were able to successfully classify songs from foreign cultures by genre.” Even as NASA explained in 2018, the stars “are performing a concert, one that never stops” through stellar sound waves, which scientists can use to determine a star’s age and size through a field known as asteroseismology.
From a garage band to a sold-out arena, even alone in a bedroom and in the depths of space, music allows us to connect and to share our stories, thoughts and feelings in a way that is universally understood. So, yes, music is inherently political, because music is inherently human.
