Wal-Mart Boycotts Green Day Album
Wal-Mart doesn’t care if Green Day has the most popular album in the US or not, the massive discount retail chain certainly won’t be stocking ‘21st Century Breakdown’.
The store flat out refused to sell the album after the band wouldn’t edit the album for language and content.
Frontman Billie Joe Armstrong complained: “Wal-Mart’s become the biggest retail outlet in the country, but they won’t carry our record because they want us to censor it.”
Wal-Mart seems to have no problem selling nasty-talking music, such as that featured on the new Eminem album – but the store insists on having a clean version of every album available (if deemed necessary, that is.
Armstrong sees “nothing dirty” about his precious album, and he isn’t having any of this nonsense.
“They want artists to censor their records in order to be carried in there,” said Armstrong. “We just said no. We’ve never done it before. You feel like you’re in 1953 or something.”
Wal-Mart spokeswoman Melissa O’Brien pointed out (to the Associated Press) that it has been the company’s policy not to stock any CD with a parental advisory sticker:
“As with all music, it is up to the artist or label to decide if they want to market different variations of an album to sell, including a version that would remove a PA rating. The label and artist in this case have decided not to do so, so we unfortunately cannot offer the CD.”
While Green Day are respectably holding true to their own ideals on “art,” it seems a little out of sorts that such a left-leaning band would care if their record was sold by such an evil conglomerate anyway – even if the company happens to be the nation’s largest seller of physical albums.
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