Viva La Green Day

by digby

What Howie says, squared. I’m crazy about this new Green Day album too. Our mutual affinity for the band isn’t surprising to me since Howie and I swam in the same punk and power pop musical pond in San Francisco back in the day, although Howie was a renowned underground DJ while I was merely a spectator. (He famously started a label and became a music mogul, while I nursed a long hangover, but that’s another story…) The minute I heard Green Day some years later, I knew they were from the Bay Area. It was a sound that seemed to be recognized somewhere deep in my DNA and I’ve always loved them.

During the Dark Days of Bush and Cheney, they were among the small handful of successful artists who were paying attention to what was really going on and had the courage to use their artistic platform to talk about it (as opposed to appearing at a rally somewhere while making music about bullshit so as not to cause a conflict between their “politics” and their “business” as so many others did.) With few exceptions, commercial political art was left to the flag waving country artists who boldly stood with Real America and the corporations which owned them. (These same Real Americans are now agitating for secession, but whatever.)

But, setting aside both Howie’s excitement and mine over this new album, Howie makes a larger point about the music business (and American business in general) with his post that is important to note:

[A]ccording to yesterday’s NY Times the release couldn’t have come at a better time for Warner Bros, their label. Reporting on the cascading economics of the music industry, the Times points to CD sales that have been cut in half in the last 10 years. Warner Bros doesn’t really stay in business by selling music; they sell bonds to investors who get sold a bill of goods.

Last week the group led by Edgar Bronfman Jr. decided to try to sell $500 million of new bonds to replace some of its existing debt and extend the overall maturity of its liabilities.

Like tickets for a 1970s concert for The Who, investors practically stampeded to get their hands on the paper. Investors were so enthusiastic that the company expanded the deal and sold $1.1 billion of senior secured notes. As a result, Warner paid off all its existing debt and extended the date by which it needed to pay it back until 2016.

U.S. Treasury bonds, for the same time span, are offering a modest 3.4% return while the Warner Music bonds are offering a juicy 9.5% annually. Some people never learn but unless Green Day puts out an album like 21st Century Breakdown every year between now and 2016, my guess is that the suckers who bought the bonds– or, more likely, the poor saps they get unloaded on– will wish they had stuck with the Treasuries… or invested their retirement funds in autographed Green Day memorabilia.

Again — still — the scams continue, and the public buys into financial magical thinking. The irony, of course, is that it’s exactly that kind of mindlessness that Green Day is talking about.

Howie updates his post with this:

The American record industry allowed itself to be bamboozled into giving WalMart and similar operations a near monopoly over their music. It was a catastrophe for them and their artists, especially emerging artists who now have no place to sell their CDs. But it should be no problem for a superstar act like Green Day, right? Well, no. Green Day won’t self-censor their songs, which WalMart demands of artists, even platinum-selling ones. So they’re not carrying 21st Century Breakdown. Billie Joe isn’t budging. “They want artists to censor their records in order to be carried in there. We just said no. We’ve never done it before. You feel like you’re in 1953 or something.”

No kidding.

Here’s Howie on the music:

I might as well admit that the whole post was just an excuse for me to kick back and work on a clip for a Green Day song. It’s a daunting task because the songs are so amazing that even before I start looking for photos, I know there’s no chance I can do the music justice. It’s kept me at bay all week. But… There are two songs called “Viva La Gloria!” (well one is “Viva La Gloria?”) that are woven into the only artistically successful rock opera I’ve ever heard. I’m opting for “Viva La Gloria?” more because there are homages that remind me of the Doors and Queen than because I like it any more than the other–!– rendition.

Viva La Gloria by Green Day from Howie Klein on Vimeo.

Update: Thinking about about Green Day keeping hope alive for me during the Dark Days reminds me that Matt Stoller sent along an email over the week-end that I’ve been meaning to pass on:

American democracy is a sprawling concept. There are hundreds of thousands of elected public positions in this country, along with tens of thousands of open meetings to consider public policy. There is candidate recruiting, volunteering, fundraising, policy-making, and campaigning for all of these positions, one way or another. And post-election, there is pressure, participation, and idea generation, all built on a civic culture that encourages people, or discourages them, from taking power and being a part of decision-making. A civic culture dominated by politicized hypernationalist conservative groups and a highly organized resource-extractive financial elite leads to certain policy outcomes, and a civic culture dominated by younger multicultural leaders focused on a sustainable society leads to a different set of policy outcomes.

Much of the damage that has happened in the last ten years has come, not from poor political leadership (though bad political leadership hasn’t helped), but from the apathetic civic culture on the left, which has been defeated by a powerfully aggressive conservative civic culture. Fortunately, a lot of us noticed this problem, and some of us started organizing to fix it. And I think we saw with the Congressional elections of 2006 and 2008, and of course, President Obama, that a culture of empowerment can change political leadership. What most of us didn’t see, however, were the cultural entrepreneurs that set the stage for allowing this change to happen.

One of them, and an important one, is Justin Krebs of Living Liberally. Living Liberally’s primary function is to run a network of clubs all over the country called Drinking Liberally, where liberals come together and socialize. There are more than 300 of these clubs, in every state (including more than 13 in Texas and 4 in Idaho). These clubs are used as recruiting grounds for volunteers and candidates, networking hubs for influential local opinion leaders, stops on liberal book tours, and places where campaigns around local and state issues can be launched. Often, the leader of a Drinking Liberally chapter will be recruited into a political or advocacy position, because it turns out that being able to organize a fun and lively get-together every week is a good screen for natural leadership abilities. Basically, they are cultural centers where people who don’t know any other liberals like them can get together and socialize. There are a lot of reasons it’s a very good idea to have a strong network of such clubs, but let me give you a tangible way to think about it.

For most Democrats thinking of running for Congress in the 1990s, a political ‘base’ meant a set of wealthy people. You had to either self-fund, work at a law firm with wealthy partners, or have a strong connection to well-capitalized interests. Today, because of Drinking Liberally, you can find a bunch of ordinary people with widespread community networks, and tap into small dollar internet fundraising, just by going to a bar on a regular basis. Think about the change that creates in who can run for office, and how they can run. Think about what that means for changing the incentives in politics.

That is just one small part of what a strong liberal civic culture means. Now, obviously, a lot more needs to be done. And I can’t quantify how many people got elected, how many volunteers went out and volunteers, or engaged in policy changes because of this organization, though many many politicians attend these gatherings or ensure their staffers go. But I can assure you that tens of thousands of highly engaged people are able to get together and organize, learn how they can make an impact, and build a new civic culture, brick by brick.

Drinking Liberally operates on a budget of less than $100k a year. There’s no foundation funding for this group and obviously the economy is awful. I know I’m feeling the pinch, as are a lot of my friends. But this is when we have to keep organizations like this alive, because this kind of social value, though hard to quantify, takes years to recreate. And I can assure you that the costs of a weak civic culture are far higher than a hundred bucks today.

So if you can, I highly encourage you to come to their annual celebration on May 30 in New York City, and buy a ticket. If you can’t make it, or just want to support this work, you can give some money here.

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