Don't give the Foo Fighters a pass for doing corporate gigs for these assholes either. They knew exactly what they were doing.
I'm disappointed in Dave grohl
Tbf it’s not like grohl needs the cash is it
It is a musician's business to know who they are performing for and why - and the more famous they are, the more it starts to matter. Grohl knows this.
The people on here who is excusing this with "capitalism bad except when people I like is doing it" arguments is just demonstrating how empty "liberal values" get when push comes to shove.
That's actually their manager's business. Literally what they hire them for. And honestly, if you're going to fault them for performing a private venue for an Amazon event, you should also fault every artist that's ever performed in like, Vegas. Casinos have been bleeding people to death long before Amazon hit the scene.
I'm not going to fault a performer for literally doing their job and taking a fat payday. I'd probably do the same in their shoes, anybody who insists otherwise isn't being honest with themselves.
It's not like the rider said "play show at Amazon, these guys just laid a lot of people off and are screaming about budget cuts so they want you to play for the rest. Here's 4 million dollars."
It probably said "corporate event for 6-10k people. Here's a check for 4 million dollars"
So you’re arguing that selling out any supposed values you might have is fine as long as the check is big enough.
Foo Fighters are a huge band. They aren’t at the whims of some all powerful manager. And Amazon’s crimes are not new, they’re not obscure information. They’re incredibly well known, frequently discussed, and go hand in hand with the mention of Amazon. They knew what they were doing, who they were doing it for.
Now, if you want to discuss the power that record labels and their business relationships hold and their contracts with the bands they produce, that’s a possible explanation for this. But we’re talking about aging millionaire white guys. Chances are, they had veto power, knew what they were doing and probably could’ve accepted a monetary fine from the record company for defying a contract obligation if that’s why they were being forced to do it. And, honestly, probably would’ve leaked that information, gotten a ton of great press, maybe gotten into a public dispute with the record label if they chose to speak out about it, and then cashed in on that.
But, like you said, they did it for a fat paycheck. They didn’t stick up for the well-documented abused workers of Amazon while cashing in on it — “virtue signaling,” as people say. They decided to do this. For money. From Amazon executives.
And that’s…not better.
The fact that this comes at the end of typical corporate purse string tightening at the expense of workers is really just the steaming shit nugget on top of this diarrhea sundae.
I'm arguing that you're villainising the wrong people.
And that was me telling you your assumption of who’s at fault was way off the mark.
They’re rockstars. They knew what they were doing and made the choice themselves.
So we're just skipping the part about the execs treating themselves to a concert after many years of union busting, horrid working conditions, innumerable other abuses, and excluding the workers. But we're going to shit on the people they hired for a gig.
Coolcoolcoolcoolcool.
So we’re just skipping the part about the execs
No... we actually talk about Amazon's shitfuckery a lot. Where have you been?
If those dirty fucking workers had just worked harder they could have a Foo Fighters concert too.
Best I can do is a YouTube video with ads for dick pills.
Fucking-A, Dave. At least Kurt never sold out.
Die a hero or live long enough to become a villain. Kurt punched his card before it could happen to him too.
I dunno. Man’s getting paid to play music. If he takes that money and does something better with it. That’s still a positive. Don’t be a hipster lol
Live a life of luxury with small portion going to annual donation for PR and tax purposes...
Bootlickers jfc
In case you haven't noticed, EVERY SINGLE FOO FIGHTERS CONCERT SUPPORTED CORPORATE OVERLORDS. The tickets you bought? Corporate Overlord sold 'em to you. The tunes you bought? Corporate Overlord. The venue you went to? Sponsored by a corporate overlord. The Beer you drank at the venue, the fucking merch you bought, hell, even the fucking parking fee you coughed up went to a corporation. You don't get to enjoy music anymore without supporting corporate overlords.
You're being an antagonistic asshole and you know it. And you use the term bootlicker incorrectly.
For those not upset and see the band "just playing a gig", what would be a line that you personally would consider too far? Would you be ok with them doing a private show for Netanyahu and his cabinet? Would a private show for Trump and his Republican lackeys be ok? How about Nestle CEO and its board, but none of its workers? Would a private show for the Proud Boys be ok if they had a "dump truck full of cash"?
What harm are they doing though? They're being paid to do a private concert, not donating to their super PAC. It goes without saying that lavish spending on executives when people are being laid off is super gross, but at the end of the day I dont think the band did anything worth being chastised for.
Well I guess I’ll be adding the Foo Fighters to my list of people that won’t be getting any money from me.
Does it matter? Sure it matters to me. I can sleep better knowing I’m not contributing to things I don’t agree with.
I expected better from Dave Grohl but here we are.
Look, I despise Amazon and Jeff bezos. I avoid Amazon and work hard to find products from retailers that aren't Amazon storefronts. But at some point, unless you're self-employed and completely self-sustaining, you're 1) whoring yourself out to somebody, and 2) sucking the knob of capitalism somewhere.
All we're left to argue is matter of degrees.
I honestly don't care who they play for, as long as it's not at the cost of of any regular scheduled gig.
The ruling class needs a very poignant reminder that their perceived value is entirely manufactured by the working class, on whose shoulders they stand. These people have no real value if the people they exploit are able exert their own agency.
Fuck these parasites. And as a matter of course, fuck the foo fighters.
Yeah, call me when consequences actually happen.
Oh look everyone it's part of the problem.
We have to all work together to give those consequences. Workers need to act as a united force to push back against the ruling class. Checking out hurt the movement. Help us show them the consequences.
They should pour out a piss bottle for the warehouse employees who couldn't attend.
To think this is a problem with just Amazon is silly. This is every American corporation. The executives of every major corporation in this country treat themselves very very well on company dimes while their workers all languish in starvation wages. The only way to fight this is to raise the minimum wage to something that is livable for the average worker. The government needs to force these companies to behave. They will never and I mean abso-fucking-lutely never choose to treat their workers with respect and dignity by paying them a decent living wage.
And the politicians that are in all of their pockets will never ever go against their corporate masters. The only way to make them listen is to get every single American to acknowledge that this is something that is needed and then push their politicians to do it or threaten their jobs by voting for someone else. This goes for both Democrats and Republicans, not quite equally but there's definitely a few Democrats that need to be replaced.
You break your back for pennies while they get millions a second to eat sushi off of a porn star's back.
The only way this gig is ethically justifiable is if the support act is a guillotine.
FF (fuck 'em) whoring themselves for Amazon execs isn't the main story here. It's the disgusting exploitation of labor for profits. Organized destruction of unions and workers rights had made this tale an everyday, everywhere occurrence. Long ago there was a time when the news would report about main street and wall street as being more intertwined. Today their well being is in opposite directions. From symbiotic to parasitic.
It seems to prefer coercion as a method to keep people producing rather than inspiring them and earning their best.
Ambush style layoffs remove the feeling of safety, making people desperate to prove they shouldn’t be next. With this approach, Amazon embraces a timelessly blood-curdling rationale: nothing concentrates the mind like a credible threat.
Annual attrition targets for a fixed percentage of people every year create a survival mentality. No one wants to be the slowest gazelle when the lion comes around again, so everyone runs faster. Classic coercion.
The real question is, how many pee bottles did they force Dave Grohl to fill in order to make his song quota in time?
Corporate musicians still suck
So that's who listens to this garbage...
I can't find much about this gig online, but the Setlist.fm page lists this as a 'private event' for Amazon Web Services.
AWS is not the part of Amazon where employees have to piss in bottles. It's their cloud hosting subsidiary, and the most profitable part of the company. I also can't find any mention that it's just the executives of AWS either. It seems more likely to me that this would have been open to the employees of AWS in general as it is the most profitable part of Amazon and the crowd in the pictures seems quite big if it were only made up of 'AWS executives who like the Foo Fighters'.
Its a yearly event that collects directors and above fork across the company to a week long "convention" that is supposed to be about building cohesive between leadership.
The author went in 2022, when they had bon jovi play, and said it was just a boozy networking event where leadership was dictated to by the execs with no actual exchange of ideas.
In 2022, Amazon made a record profits, but even then they were admonished to save money. Still, no layoffs.
This year? They also made record profits, but had record layoffs, yet the party goes on.
The authors overall point is that Amazon is successful by asking people to "lean in," to go the extra mile. When you freeze wages and layoff 10,000s of people while threatening more and still throw your 10 million dollar party for yourself, you are telling good people to not only leave, but to lean right the fuck out before they do.
Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed