Super Bowl halftime band urged to take a knee

Let’s get this out of the way right at the start: Maroon 5 isn’t going to take a knee or do anything else that might be considered political when it performs at halftime of the Super Bowl on Sunday evening.

That’s not who Maroon 5 is. They took the money that many artists wouldn’t take in protest of the NFL blacklisting and treatment of Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback who took a knee during the National Anthem to protest racial inequality in America, and found himself out of work.

But Roger Waters of Pink Floyd is going to make sure Maroon 5’s safe approach to things is going to be uncomfortable for the band, which already canceled the traditional headliner news conference for fear of being asked tough questions, although it took the safe way out of that, too, by claiming it was just too busy putting its show together. Right.

Waters released a video on Thursday urging Maroon 5 to show a little spine.

Here’s his open letter:

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!” 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.

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.

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.” 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.

Love,
Roger Waters

“I’m not in the right profession if I can’t handle a little bit of controversy,” Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine tells Entertainment Tonight. “It’s what it is. We expected it. We’d like to move on from it and speak through the music,” he said. “I silenced all the noise and listened to myself and made my decision based upon how I felt.”

“I’d like to think that people know where I stand as a human being after two decades of doing this,” Levine said. “So what I would say is, we’re going to keep doing what we’re doing, hopefully without becoming politicians, to make people understand, ‘We got you.’ ”

An immediate translation was not available.

Related: Super Bowl 2019 halftime show: Prop bet suggests a ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ song could be played by Maroon 5 (CBS)