We can all blame this on a heckler in Melbourne, Australia. While doing a solo concert, the heckler yelled at Radiohead's Thom Yorke to make a statement about the Gaza situation. Yorke didn't right away. He, instead, said he was suffering from mental stress about being asked to do so.
His intuition told him to keep quiet. Not because he didn't have an opinion about the horrible situation, but because he knew offering an opinion would only be met with skepticism and would also be divisive.
Yorke, of course, is a human being with ideas about how the world should be run and how people should treat one another, but he is also a musical artist and not a politician. While we might want any musical artist to make a statement on something important (and let's be honest, one we agree with, however we stand on the subject), what they say only changes things in theory.
Reggie Watts calls Radiohead's Thom Yorke out for expressing his views
Music is a tool for artists to use to try to change the world, but the actual changes are rare. We might want music to make the world better, but it might be more of an individual experience.
Plus, anyone expressing their views on toxic social media is likely to be met with more negativity than positivity. People are just waiting by their computers to disagree with everything they see on the interwebs. This is where Yorke trod when commenting upon the Gaza situation.
Taking to Instagram, he wrote a fairly lengthy discourse that blamed both sides (the Israeli government and Hamas in Gaza) for the atrocities, and then made the mistake of implying he felt forced into making any public statement at all. He shouldn't have, because there was no winning in whatever he said, especially if he tried to walk the fence in the middle.
Worse, he ended his post by saying "social media witch hunts" cause an artist to come out with their views.
Comedian/musician/actor Reggie Watts took issue with what Yorke wrote and commented on the IG post by writing in part that Yorke's view "centers his hurt feelings and frames his fans’ demands for him to speak up as a ‘social media witch hunt’, instead of recognizing the urgency of their call for him to speak out against the world-historical humanitarian crisis in Palestine."
He added, "I hope Thom will reflect and decenter himself from the public outcry against the genocide."
Which was Yorke's entire, though poorly-written, point. He didn't want to say anything at all, and except for a heckler in Melbourne, maybe he wouldn't have. No matter what Yorke (or Watts) says, the situation is not going to change, unfortunately.