Culture
Robert Kraft Spends $1.2 Billion On A Stadium And Gets Upstaged By Zach Bryan's Laundry
By Bruno Von Falken, . BSN Network. Satire.
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- Robert Kraft, the 82-year-old billionaire who owns the New England Patriots, Gillette Stadium, and apparently the right to decide which feelings are permitted within a 68,756-seat radius of his person, suffered a significant setback Thursday evening when country singer Zach Bryan walked onto his stage wearing a Free Palestine shirt and roughly 65,000 people cheered.
The shirt, which is available on several websites for between $18 and $35, accomplished in four seconds what Macklemore's entire banned world tour could not: it made Robert Kraft's stadium the story.
For those who missed last year's episode, Kraft had barred rapper Macklemore from performing at Gillette after Macklemore made pro-Palestinian statements at a Boston-area show, calling it a matter of the venue's core values. The ban was announced with the gravity of a UN resolution and the legal weight of a man who owns the parking lot.
Bryan, who had apparently not received the values memo, stepped to the microphone in the offending garment, paused for effect, and then played a two-hour set to a sold-out crowd while Kraft was, presumably, somewhere in the building.
Kraft released a statement after Bryan's Gillette appearance last year saying he was "disappointed" in artists who use his stage for political purposes, a sentence that requires you to believe a stadium named after a razor company is a politics-free zone.
Reached for comment, a Kraft spokesperson said the organization remains committed to "fostering an inclusive environment where all fans feel welcome," which is the sentence a legal team writes when the actual sentence cannot be printed. The spokesperson did not elaborate on how an inclusive environment squares with a formal musician blacklist, possibly because the question has no good answer and the hot dogs were getting cold.
Bryan has not issued a formal statement, which is the correct move. The shirt said everything the shirt needed to say. It did not call a press conference. It did not issue a values framework. It was a shirt.
What Kraft has demonstrated, at considerable personal cost to his own narrative, is that banning one artist from a venue does not ban the sentiment, it just moves it two tour dates down the calendar and gives it a more photogenic messenger. Macklemore had a backing track and a microphone. Zach Bryan had 65,000 people who already knew every word to his songs and were in a mood.
Sports economists have estimated the Gillette Stadium complex represents an investment of over a billion dollars in physical infrastructure, not counting the franchise value, the naming rights deal, or the two decades of brand management. Zach Bryan's shirt cost less than the parking.
The shirt is currently sold out in medium.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/zach-bryan-free-palestine-shirt-gillette-stadium-macklemore-1235636423/