English singer, songwriter, bassist, and composer George Roger Waters recently said Mark Zuckerberg requested to use one of Pink Floyd’s most famous songs to promote Instagram. In his response to the man he calls “one of the most powerful idiots in the world,” Waters said, “No F— way!”
At a recent New York City event at the People’s Forum to advocate for the freedom of Julian Assange — the WikiLeaks founder who is imprisoned in London — Waters produced a printed page of a message he said he had received “on the Internet” that morning. The 77-year-old former Pink Floyd frontman and songwriter, in a video shared on Twitter by La Jornada, said, “It’s a request for the rights to use my song Another Brick in the Wall II in the making of a film to promote Instagram. So it’s a missive from Mark Zuckerberg to me, right? Arrived this morning with an offer of a huge, huge amount of money and my answer is ‘F— you!’”
The crowd cheered Waters on as he added, “I only mention this because it’s the insidious movement of them to take over absolutely everything. So those of us who do have any power, and I do have a little bit — in terms of the control of the publishing of my songs I do, anyway — so I will not be a party to this b—s—, Zuckerberg.”
“¡Vete a la chingada!”: @rogerwaters a Mark Zuckerberg. El músico contó que le ofrecieron “una gran cantidad de dinero” por permitir el uso de Another brick in the wall II para promover Instagram. Lo narró en un acto por la libertad de Julian Assange (@Wikileaks)#VideosLaJornada pic.twitter.com/gEVqaor8Eo
— La Jornada (@lajornadaonline) June 12, 2021
Waters went on to read the rights request at the event held on June 10. “'We want to thank you for considering this project. We feel that the core sentiment of this song is still so prevalent and necessary today, which speaks to how timeless a work...,’ And yet they want to use it to make Facebook and Instagram even bigger and more powerful than it already is so that it can continue to censor all of us in this room and prevent this story about Julian Assange getting out to the general public so the general public could go, ‘What?! What? No. No more.’”
Waters, whose concerts have featured Trump’s head attached to a pig’s body elaborated on his disdain for the Facebook founder. “Zuckerberg features in my new rock ’n’ roll show. I’ve got him sit — no, I shouldn’t tell you. But how did this little p— who started off by saying, ‘She’s pretty; we’ll give her a 4 out of 5. She’s ugly we’ll give her a 1' — how the f— did he get any power? And yet here he is one of the most powerful idiots in the world.”
Waters does have an official Facebook page (though, as he says, he is banned by former bandmate David Gilmour from posting on Pink Floyd’s Facebook page, with its 30 million followers), according to Los Angeles Times. As Waters’ remarks went viral, he invited “trolls” to challenge him saying, “Call me a hypocrite for posting this on Zuckerberg’s crappy censored platform.”
Aside from co-founding one of rock’s most influential concept-oriented bands and writing or co-writing classics like Money, Another Brick in the Wall Pt. II, Comfortably Numb and Wish You Were Here, Waters has been a vocal activist for a number of reasons. In response to the Israeli aggression in Palestine, Waters advocated for complete cultural boycott of Israel, which has been dubbed “controversial” by the LA Times. Previously, the maestro has clamorously contested Trump, anti-Brexit and has been raising his voice for Assange in numerous rallies.
Waters famously called out Radiohead front man Thom Yorke for holding concerts in the Israeli capital, Tel Aviv in 2017. The singer has routinely spoken about how the people in the West are indoctrinated to believe that Israel is not an apartheid state, even lending a voice-over to the 2016 documentary film Occupation of the American Mind.
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