Sunday, November 29, 2009
Walmart loses
After talking about the situation of the band Green Day's new cd "Breakdown" not being sold in Walmart retails around the country sends a strong political message to America. I Google'd the issues and found an MTV News article about the complications. The band Green Day has been around since the late 80's and broke into the mainstream in 1994 with their cd titled "Dookie". Since then, the band has had a strong passion for writing poltically influenced lyrics and suggested themes and they are keeping to their plans still. The largest retailer in the country, Walmart refuses to cell parental advisory CD's to music enthusiasts which usually isn't a problem for an artist because they are given the option to simply make a radio edit version of their album for sale. Even the most contriversial bands have edited their lyrics to be sold at Walmart such as; Nirvana, Eminem, ACDC , and other Rap artists. The impact is that Green Day is strongly against government regulations much like these and they plan to continue to take a stand against them. Green Day is very political including their last cd "American Idiot" which targeted political views and American's stereo types of politics. "Wal-Mart has become the biggest retail outfit in the country, but they won't carry our record because they wanted us to censor it," the article quotes frontman Billie Joe Armstrong as saying. "They want artists to censor their records in order to be carried there ... we just said, 'No.' We've never done it before. You feel like you're in 1953 or something." Good for Green Day sticking to their words and continuing to be political because music has the potential to influence mass audience effectivly. The problem I can see with their decision is the lack of record sales that are already affected by the MP3 downloading sites. As of May 21st, 2009 Green Day had the #1 album in the country no thanks to Walmart, but I wonder if their overall record sales would have been greater if the power house Walmart made their album vastly available? Im glad Green Day keeps their repuation and image of being anti government and hopefully they can make profits without changing their music.
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I would think that they would get more sales from the publicity of being banned from WalMart than they would have sold actual CDs in Walmart.
ReplyDeleteFirst let me start by saying, yay Green Day, stick it to the man, You’re a great band, I like you. That being said, 20th century breakdown sucked. I am a Green Day fan and I did buy the album, so I feel I can make that statement pretty confidently. Green Day’s recent political agenda has become about as coherent and significant as my grandma’s ramblings about rotary phones and Medicare. Now to Wal-mart, I think we all know that they are evil. This veil of child friendly music sales that don’t feature curse words is really just a ploy to get idiot parents to forget about Wal-mart sweatshops in China. I know I’m being extremely cynical and making a lot of assumptions but hey, this is a blog. I’m just waiting for the day that people who say they hate Wal-mart so much actually stop shopping there… myself included.
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