Pink responds to backlash, says controversy made her feel “lonely”

• Pink reposted criticism calling for Macklemore to be dropped from Ed Sheeran's tour over his nightly pro-Palestinian statements.
• She stayed silent for a week amid heavy backlash, then posted a ~1,300-word explanation in her own words.

Pink has ended a week of public silence Friday with an extensive statement addressing the fallout from her decision to repost criticism of Macklemore following his pro-Palestinian statements during Ed Sheeran's tour.

In a lengthy social media post, the singer walked back the manner in which she first weighed in, acknowledging that resharing someone else's words wasn't the same as speaking for herself. "A repost isn't a statement, and a meme isn't a spine," she wrote, adding that she'd "rather be disagreed with for what I actually said than hated for what anybody else wrote."

"I'm not going to litigate a complex war in an Instagram caption," she wrote, "and I'm not going to recite anybody's slogan to earn back a follower." 

What triggered the repost

According to Pink, her objection wasn't to Macklemore's political views or his right to voice them.

 Rather, she said, it was his framing of those views from the stage. She described a moment where he "dedicated a song to the movement of his choice, and then took the mic to tell all of the Jews in the stadium that it wasn't about them." Her response: "You don't get to decide that for us."

She was careful to draw a line between criticizing that moment and calling for censorship. "I have never asked for another artist to be silenced and I'm not asking now," she wrote. "I don't need anyone fired, and I don't need a refund."

Sitting with the backlash

Pink didn't shy away from describing how isolating the response has been. "I have stood up for other people’s people my whole career, and I know exactly what it costs," she wrote, citing her past advocacy and her 2006 song "Dear Mr. President," released amid the Iraq War.

 "And now I'm standing up for my own people, and I thought I knew going in how lonely that would be. And it's lonelier than that. But I'm doing it anyway."

She said she's noticed a shift in how criticism reaches her. "'Zionist,' spat like it's a slur, by people who couldn't tell you the details of what I believe, because I hadn't told them yet," she wrote. "I wasn't asked. I was told."

 

 

 

 

 

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The reaction

Social media users pushed back against the statement, with some arguing that a repost to 11 million followers carries its own weight regardless of authorship, and others expressing disappointment in her stance.

Pink later closed the comment section on her post.