Green Day don't want to go to WalMart

You'd have thought - given their target audience tends to be the sort who still go shopping with their parents - Green Day would be determined to do everything they could to make sure their new record, 21st Century Breakdown, would appear on the shelves of WalMart.

It's too their credit, though, that they have refused the edits the store demanded and taken the loss of not having the record in the stores:

[I]n Armstrong's view, "There's nothing dirty about our record."

"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."

There is a wider point, though: WalMart say in their defence that they won't stock Parental Advisory stickered product, and it's up to the bands involved if they want to make a version which avoids the sticker.

You could ask why Green Day choose to rail against WalMart for rejecting stickered content, rather than at the stickering process in the first place.

You might even ask that if you support Tipper Gore types who don't like sweary music, in fact. Because surely WalMart refusing to stock the parental advisory stickers is not just an indication of prissiness on their part, but also that the sticker system doesn't really work. Because if stickering did keep kids from "unacceptable" content, surely WalMart would be just as happy to sell Green Day's album to its customers as they are, for example, to sell them the SAW movies?