WATCH: Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters Absolutely Savages ‘Little Prick’ Mark Zuckerberg After Turning Down ‘Huge’ Ad Offer for Iconic Song
Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters (Martin Bernetti/AFP via Getty Images)
Songwriter, bassist, icon, and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Roger Waters, co-founder of legendary rock band Pink Floyd, expressed his lack of enthusiasm for the idea of the all-time classic “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” in an advertising campaign, despite a “huge” offer from Facebook.
At an event for Julian Assange, the rocker told reporters he’d just turned down Facebook’s offer, which was for an advertisement promoting Instagram. And he had harsh words for Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
After some discussion at the event about the flow of information and censorship by social media and tech companies, Waters brought up the offer that he said had just “arrived on the internet” that morning.
“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,” he said, as the audience laughed. “So it’s a missive, it’s a missive from Mark Zuckerberg to me, right? Arrived this morning with an offer a huge, huge amount of money.”
“And the answer is, ‘Fuck You. No fucking way,'” he said. “And I only mention that because this an insidious, it’s the insidious movement of them to take over absolutely everything.”
“Those of who do have any power, and I do have a little bit, in terms of the control of the publishing my songs I do anyway,” he continued. “So, I will not be a party to this bullshit, Zuckerberg.”
There was then some joking around about cursing on-air and George Carlin‘s famous “seven words” routine, Waters said he didn’t mean to interrupt the Q&A. But then he added, “you wanna hear what these pricks have got to say?”
He read aloud from the storyboard about how they would use the song in the ad. Reading the conclusion from the offer, he quoted Facebook as saying “‘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,’ it’s true.”
“And yet,” he continued, “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!”
When his fellow panelist Randy Credico asked “should we delete Facebook?” Waters went off on Mark Zuckerberg again.
“You know, that’s a really good question. Probably,” he said. “Zuckerberg features in my new rock and roll show, I’ve got him si– no I shouldn’t tell you. But he does.”
“How did this little prick who started off” by rating women based on their looks, “how the [fuck] did he get any power in anything?”
“And yet here he is, one of the most powerful idiots in the world. And he’s dictating–” Waters said before being interrupted with a comment from Credico and ending it there.
Rolling Stone reports that Waters has recently fought with former Pink Floyd bandmate David Gilmour over access to the band’s social media accounts.
Watch the clip above, via the Assange Defense Committee‘s event.
