There is perhaps no freedom quite as intoxicating as driving down an American highway with the windows open and the music blasting from the speakers, the sort of freedom that makes you believe, if only for the duration of a song, that the world is a beautiful place and everything is going to be just fine. Except these days you might change the station halfway through because the artist said something so politically insufferable that you can no longer listen to the damn song without thinking about it. Suddenly, what was supposed to be three minutes of bliss becomes yet another involuntary confrontation with American politics.
Perhaps the only thing worse than the above-mentioned scenario is paying good money to see a musician whose songs you love, whose politics you neither know nor particularly care to know, only to discover halfway through the concert that you've apparently purchased a ticket to a political rally, complete with declarations of "Free Palestine," denunciations of Donald Trump or a sermon about the supposed destruction of America by the radical left. Because God forbid we should be allowed to enjoy a guitar solo without first establishing where everyone stands on the Middle East. Just look at Ed Sheeran, whose tour became a geopolitical circus after opening act Macklemore declared "Free Palestine" onstage, prompting objections from stadium owners, Macklemore's removal, solidarity withdrawals by other performers and Sheeran himself having to explain the whole damn mess (in the public's defense, Sheeran dug his own grave on this one).
Nothing is safe anymore: we can't watch television in peace, we can't eat dinner in peace, we can't travel in peace, we can't listen to music in peace and we certainly can't lie in bed scrolling through social media in peace, although admittedly that last one might be our own fault, because somewhere along the way celebrities decided that possessing a microphone and a reasonably attractive face qualified them to deliver unsolicited lectures on geopolitics, and the rest of us were there to listen. And so I would like to thank Metallica frontman James Hetfield, who, addressing fans at the Sphere in Las Vegas on Saturday, thanked them for spending their time and money to see the band before declaring, "Metallica is not here, like some other entertainers, to influence you with their bullshit," explaining that the point was to forget about the outside world and that the band's agenda was "love, energy and heavy music, baby!" Imagine that! How revolutionary and un-American!
A musician acknowledging that people have paid to hear music rather than his political opinions. There is something almost punk about a famous band deciding that the stage is for music, that the audience is there to hear songs rather than sermons, and that perhaps the most radical thing an artist can do in 2026 is resist the apparently irresistible urge to tell everyone else what to think. We don't need our musicians to be politically illiterate or morally indifferent... but we also do not need to know about their literacy or morality.
We just need them to make good songs and remember that sometimes a concert is a concert and the greatest gift they can give an exhausted American public is the blessed, liberating, exciting, unique and increasingly unfamiliar pleasure of shutting up and playing the music. Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Gray R.
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