Green Day’s Whining Not Limited to Songs

Green Day, which has been around since the late 1980s but only achieved mainstream commercial success with their 2004 album American Idiot, has a bone to pick with Wal-Mart. Why? Wal-Mart won’t carry their new CD, entitled 21st Century Breakdown, unless they provide a special version that doesn’t contain language considered offensive by the retail giant.

Wal-Mart has a longstanding policy about not selling CDs that would require a parental advisory sticker, but that doesn’t stop the navel-gazing band from kvetching about what they seem to perceive as censorship:

“They want artists to censor their records in order to be carried in there,” he said. “We just said no. We’ve never done it before. You feel like you’re in 1953 or something.”

Newsflash to the boys in the band: that’s what’s called making a business decision. Wal-Mart’s business decision is to ask bands to create “clean” versions of their albums for sale in Wal-Mart stores. Some bands comply while others, like Green Day, do not – in turn making their own business decision (something that Obama has yet to take away from businesses other than some in the auto industry). (more…)