Green Day Slams Wal-Mart

We don’t have to worry about Green Day going the way of Bruce Springsteen or AC/DC any time soon.

The band is slamming Wal-Mart in the press for for its censorship policy. Green Day’s new record, 21st Century Breakdown (which is #1 in the charts), is not being sold by Wal-Mart. The company famously refuses to sell any albums with a parental advisory label - often forcing artists to produce an edited version of the album specifically for Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart demanded Green Day edit their album, and the band refused.

Said frontman Billie Joe Armstrong:

“Wal-Mart’s become the biggest retail outlet in the country, but they won’t carry our record because they wanted us to censor it...There’s nothing dirty about our record...They want artists to censor their records in order to be carried in there...We just said no. We’ve never done it before. You feel like you’re in 1953 or something.”

Guitarist Mike Dirnt was honest about the implications of Wal-Mart’s policy. A super-popular group like Green Day can obviously survive without Wal-Mart’s sales, but smaller artists are forced to compromise their product or lose a huge chunk of sales:

“If you think about bands that are struggling or smaller than Green Day ... to think that to get record your out in places like that, but they won’t carry it because of the content and you have to censor yourself,” he said. “I mean, what does that say to a young kid whose trying to speak his mind making a record for the first time? It’s like a game that you have to play. You have to refuse to play it.”

As always, we’re confronted with the dilemma: Wal-Mart controls an ever-increasing share of the U.S. retail market, and is using that to continually homogenize and censor the product that it sells.

Is that good for the country?

Posted by Media Team on Thursday, May 21, 2009

Click Here for a Printer-Friendly Version