Green Day Sticks It To The Man, “21st Century” Style
In 2004 they asked not to be called American Idiots. Now, Green Day is trying to prove that they are not American Sellouts.
The alt-rocker’s latest album, 21st Century Breakdown, will not be carried in Wal-Mart stores due to the band’s refusal to create an edited version specifically for the retailer. According to Wal-Mart policy, any album containing an explicit lyrics sticker is automatically barred from their stores.
For now, the band appears to be treating the blacklisting, and resulting loss of sales, as a minor inconveinence.
“As the biggest record store in America, they should probably have an obligation to sell people the correct art,” Bassist Mike Dirnt told the Associated Press.
The “art” Mike is referring to?
For those of you who couldn’t tell a Green Day from a weekday, here’s a sample from the track “Horseshoes and Hand Grenades.”
Well, everything that you employ
Was meant for me to destory
To the ground now
So don’t you f*** me around
Because I’ll shoot you down
I’m gonna drink, fight and f***
I’m no rocker, but that has to be stretching the definition of “art.”
Even more disturbing than Mike’s creative defintion of “art,” is Green Day’s watered-down idea of what it means to stick it to “the man” – in this case the corporate suits at Wal-Mart.
21st Century Breakdown has essentially been kicked out of the biggest music retailer in the country, and all Green Day can do is say “no, sorry, we won’t make you another record.”
Come on. That’s so NOT rock-n-roll. Green Day is supposed to be the voice of a misguided, disgruntled generation.
If the band wants to retain their street cred with teens and unemployed twenty-somethings across the nation, this is what they need to do.
First, demand that all of their records be pulled from Wal-Mart shelves immediately.
Of course, making this happen would involve lawyers, record label executives, and a bunch of other balding white guys. And there’s nothing kick-ass about that.
Rather than waiting for that legal battle to play out, the band should take matters into their own hands and schedule a different kind of summer tour this year.
Instead of hitting the stadiums and arenas, Green Day needs to gas up the bus and stop at every Wal-Mart in the country and buy (or better yet, steal) every single Green Day album from each store.
After each CD heist, they would hold an impromptu free concert in the Wal-Mart parking lot, setting up their stage as close to the front doors as possible.
The liberated Green Day cd’s? The band could inscribe each one with some witty, filthy piece of anti-Wal-Mart rhetoric (use your imagination here) and pass them out as collectors items to fans. Or, maybe they could just pile them up on the stage and blow them up. Pyrotechnics = cool.
Trespassing, theft, use of illegal explosives, disturbing the peace….at thousands of locations across the US?
Now, that’s sticking it to the man.
21st Century Ain't What it Used to Be
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I don’t agree with you assertion. Without Green Day’s insightful lyrics, I would not have met my girlfriend. (It’s a long story.)
Hi Lawrence, thanks for stopping by.
I’m all about long stories…let’s hear it!
It was a warm, summer evening – the kind that causes beads of sweat to run down your back and get absorbed by the elastic band of your tighty-whities. I had my iPod earbuds in and one of Green Day’s lyrical masterpieces thundering through the thin, white wires. I was lost in the whimsical world of harmonic bliss, and was not exactly paying attention to where I was walking. Then, out of nowhere, I stumbled across something laying in a pool of its own urine on the street corner. Over the melodies pounding in my ears I faintly heard the screams of a street woman who just had a 369 pound man trip across her and fall face-first into her stolen grocery cart. It was at that moment that our eyes met, her lice jumped all over me and I fell in love. Had I no en listening the Green Day, I would have avoided her, never tripped over her and never fallen in love with Helga.