On Wednesday, Roger Waters, the co-lead vocalist for Pink Floyd of whom Maroon 5’s Adam Levine once wrote, “Listening to Pink Floyd instantly makes me feel like an insecure teenager who no one understands…all over again…”, released a statement on Facebook in which he urged Levines’ Maroon 5, as well as Travis Scott and Big Boi, to take a knee during their Super Bowl halftime performance in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick. Waters also referenced a Change.org petition that both demanded Maroon 5 either cancel its performance or take a knee during it.
Accompanying the statement on Facebook was a video of Pink Floyd taking a knee in September 2017.
Waters wrote:
There is a petition on Change.org aimed at persuading Maroon 5, Travis Scott and Big Boi to take a knee at halftime on Sunday: This is my band taking a knee at the end of a gig in Hartford, Connecticut on Sunday 24th of September 2017. We did it in solidarity with San Francisco Quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s gesture of protest against the endemic racism and often deadly force meted out by police departments across this land. It was the third Sunday of Colin Kaepernick’s lock out by the NFL. The message was clear, “Shut your mouth, boy!”
Waters showed his comprehensive knowledge of American football by referring to Kaepernick as “one of the greatest quarterbacks who ever played the game”:
Next Sunday will be the 36th Sunday he has been locked out of your national game. This is not a victory for the NFL, it is a defeat, you have denied football fans everywhere the pleasure and the honor of watching one of the greatest quarterbacks who ever played the game, and you have shown your true colors. You can sit in your boardrooms and huff and puff on your cigars in your glass boxes, but your action is a poke in the eye for everything that is decent in America.
He went full Kapernick, saying he was “an American hero”:
Colin Kaepernick is an American hero. If the USA is to have a future, it is the Colin Kaepernicks of this world who will lead you there, in fact, it is Colin Kaepernick who is leading you now.
Then he addressed Maroon 5:
My colleagues Maroon 5, Travis Scott and Big Boi are performing during the halftime show at the Super-bowl this coming Sunday, I call upon them to “take a knee” on stage in full sight. I call upon them to do it in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, to do it for every child shot to death on these mean streets, to do it for every bereaved mother and father and brother and sister. My mother used to say to me, “In any situation there is nearly always a right thing to do, just do it.”
And an attack on President Trump:
So, there you go my brothers, you are faced with a choice, I’m not saying it will be easy, all the Presidents men, all the huffers and puffers, will be royally pissed off, but, $#@%’em, I call upon you to do it because it’s the right thing to do and because somewhere inside you know it.