Roger Waters Rips Mark Zuckerberg, Turns Down ‘Huge’ Music Licensing Offer
This "brick" won't be going on that "wall," at least according to Roger Waters who used a public forum to reveal that he had turned down a "huge" offer from Mark Zuckerberg to place "Another Brick in the Wall II" in a film to promote Instagram.
The onetime Pink Floyd vocalist and solo artist appeared at a special event that was part of a campaign to free WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who was arrested in 2019 after his asylum was revoked by the Ecuadorian government. Assange had been sought for a criminal investigation over leaking secret American documents.
As Waters sat with the panel on the stage, he presented a folder that held a letter from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that requested the usage of the Pink Floyd song "Another Brick in the Wall" in a film that would promote Instagram.
Waters did not hold back, telling the audience, “So it's a missive from Mark Zuckerberg to me. Arrived this morning, with an offer of a huge, huge amount of money, and the answer is – ‘Fuck you! No fucking way!’”
The singer then stated that he felt the request was just another example of "an insidious movement of them to take over absolutely everything.”
Reading a portion of the letter to the audience, Waters recited, “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 your work is, truly."
He then scoffed, "And yet they want to use it to make Facebook and Instagram even bigger and more powerful than it already is, so it can continue to censor all of us in this room and prevent this story about Julian Assange getting out. So the general public could go, ‘What? What? No! No more!’”
“I will not be a party to this bullshit, Zuckerberg,” Waters stated, then adding, “You think, 'How did this little prick – who started off by saying, 'She is pretty, we'll give her a four out of five,' 'She's ugly, we'll give her a one' – how the fuck did he get any power in anything? And yet here he is, one of the most powerful idiots in the world.”
"Another Brick in the Wall" first appeared on Pink Floyd's 1979 album The Wall as a three-part composition. The second part was released as a single and topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart before eventually being certified as a platinum single in the U.S.