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).
Will Wal-Mart come to regret not putting the album, which has sold some 250,000 copies already and is at the top of the charts, on its shelves? Perhaps, but that’s their problem if they end up losing money. Likewise, it’s Green Day’s problem if they end up losing money because they prefer to stay true to their art and not comply with Wal-Mart’s request.
I’m surprised that they didn’t come out and say that Wal-Mart was violating their First Amendment rights (which would be incorrect, BTW), but reading between the lines, one can guess that this is what they’re thinking. Yet like most libs, they want to have their cake and eat it too:
But bassist Mike Dirnt said: “As the biggest record store in America, they should probably have an obligation to sell people the correct art.”
Translation: Wal-Mart should be forced to sell their CD, even if it violates the code of ethics to which Wal-Mart adheres.
This is the kind of thinking that ended up with eHarmony.com, a Christian-based online dating service and private business, being sued by a lesbian for discrimination because the site didn’t cater to gays and lesbians. No matter that gays and lesbians had other dating sites they could join; one site was not available and therefore discrimination must be taking place. (eHarmony ended up buckling under pressure.)
No matter that consumers have a number of outlets where they can purchase 21st Century Breakdown in all its unedited, crass glory. The meanies at Wal-Mart won’t carry it, and suddenly budding musicians might become discouraged!
“If you think about bands that are struggling or smaller than Green Day … to think that to get your record 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 who’s 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.”
Here’s a suggestion, boys: take a civics class and read Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics: A Commonsense Guide to the Economy. You might learn something.
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