More often than not, the big Inside the Beltway civil liberties and progressive advocacy organizations might be hard for regular Americans to relate to, especially Americans under 40. Hard as they try-- and the ones I'm in touch with do try hard-- there's often a social disconnect somewhere along the line. People For the American Way, the granddaddy of 'em all, just announced something that is very easily relatable for the vast majority of young Americans. On October 10, they'll be presenting their Spirit of Liberty Award to Billie Joe Armstrong, Tre Cool and Mike Dirnt-- GREEN DAY-- the 2006 Spirit of Liberty Award. PFAW has all the info about the ceremony, as well as the other nominees, here and I'm sure they add the Green Day information in a day or two. (It just happened.)When I worked at Warner Bros, Green Day got signed. Warner Bros has never been real good at breaking new band from scratch. Warner Bros has always been VERY good at taking independent self-starters, like R.E.M., the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Green Day, and helping to break them gigantically. When Green Day came to Warner Bros, they had been touring incessantly, releasing indie albums and building a fan base-- and selling hundreds of thousands of CDs. I stopped counting when the first album they released for Warner Bros., DOOKIE, sold 20,000,000, something few artists in history have accomplished.It's wonderful when any artist has that kind of commercial success. It's even more wonderful when the artists are down-to-earth and real. Billie, Tre and Mike may be avid readers for all I know, but they don't get their core political ideas from books. It always struck me that those ideas and values came from their basic, formative life experience-- which makes them far more powerful and, in Green Day's case, more easy to get across to a mass audience.In my view, AMERICAN IDIOT is as important to understanding the Bush era as is Daily Kos or books like David Sirota's Hostile Takeover or films by Michael Moore or Robert Greenwald. In the tradition of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and The Clash, Green Day are songwriters who have managed to harness their generation's most basic relationships to society and expressing it, powerfully and viscerally, for the entire world.Nothing's going to keep me from their presentation October 10. Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame will be speaking too. Green Day and Joe and Valerie... what a combination!! The only other rockers who have gotten the Spirit of Liberty Award were Neil Young and Don Henley. Normally the kinds of people who get these awards have been Bill Moyers, Walter Cronkite, Ted Turner, Teddy Kennedy, Charles Kuralt, Aaron Sorkin, the South Park guys, Nancy Pelosi, Norman Lear, Ben Affleck, George Lopez, Barbara Jordan, Ed Norton, Gore Vidal, George Clooney, Dick Durbin... Meanwhile, I'll just keep listening to their great albums and watching their videos.
C-Mor Kinkadoink says
Green Day have been brilliant about a.) Taking their music seriously b.) Not taking themselves too seriously, and most importantly c.) Treating their audience as a smart free thinking generation. BRAVO! to Green Day.
I'm very interesteed to see what happens with Sam Bayer's script. Maybe American Idiot will be as important a rock film as say Quadrophoenia.
Wanbli says
I am a big fan of Billie Joe and Green Day and consider American Idiot to be one of the best rock albums of the last 20 years.
Kudos, they deserve it
ocpunkster says
Green Day have, for me, stuck out as a band that doesnt try to conform. As a matter of fact, when Billie Joe got a rude letter from a "concerned parent" about their music, Billie Joe wrote back. The line that stuck out for me in his reply was, "I don't write music for other people. I write for myself." Those words made me respect him even more.
They deserve this more than anyone :)
More often than not, the big Inside the Beltway civil liberties and progressive advocacy organizations might be hard for regular Americans to relate to, especially Americans under 40. Hard as they try-- and the ones I'm in touch with do try hard-- there's often a social disconnect somewhere along the line. People For the American Way, the granddaddy of 'em all, just announced something that is very easily relatable for the vast majority of young Americans. On October 10, they'll be presenting their Spirit of Liberty Award to Billie Joe Armstrong, Tre Cool and Mike Dirnt-- GREEN DAY-- the 2006 Spirit of Liberty Award. PFAW has all the info about the ceremony, as well as the other nominees, here and I'm sure they add the Green Day information in a day or two. (It just happened.)When I worked at Warner Bros, Green Day got signed. Warner Bros has never been real good at breaking new band from scratch. Warner Bros has always been VERY good at taking independent self-starters, like R.E.M., the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Green Day, and helping to break them gigantically. When Green Day came to Warner Bros, they had been touring incessantly, releasing indie albums and building a fan base-- and selling hundreds of thousands of CDs. I stopped counting when the first album they released for Warner Bros., DOOKIE, sold 20,000,000, something few artists in history have accomplished.It's wonderful when any artist has that kind of commercial success. It's even more wonderful when the artists are down-to-earth and real. Billie, Tre and Mike may be avid readers for all I know, but they don't get their core political ideas from books. It always struck me that those ideas and values came from their basic, formative life experience-- which makes them far more powerful and, in Green Day's case, more easy to get across to a mass audience.In my view, AMERICAN IDIOT is as important to understanding the Bush era as is Daily Kos or books like David Sirota's Hostile Takeover or films by Michael Moore or Robert Greenwald. In the tradition of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and The Clash, Green Day are songwriters who have managed to harness their generation's most basic relationships to society and expressing it, powerfully and viscerally, for the entire world.Nothing's going to keep me from their presentation October 10. Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame will be speaking too. Green Day and Joe and Valerie... what a combination!! The only other rockers who have gotten the Spirit of Liberty Award were Neil Young and Don Henley. Normally the kinds of people who get these awards have been Bill Moyers, Walter Cronkite, Ted Turner, Teddy Kennedy, Charles Kuralt, Aaron Sorkin, the South Park guys, Nancy Pelosi, Norman Lear, Ben Affleck, George Lopez, Barbara Jordan, Ed Norton, Gore Vidal, George Clooney, Dick Durbin... Meanwhile, I'll just keep listening to their great albums and watching their videos.
Locating MOG account...
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