Wal-Mart (the power-hungry retail outlet I avoid like a Downtown Vegas hooker) refuses to sell Green Day's 21st Century Breakdown (the album I avoid like naked pictures of Joan Rivers) unless the band censors the album.

Wal-Mart has a long history of forcing artists to edit the content or album artwork if deemed too offensive for pantywaists by the retail Gestapo. Heaven forbid if this monopolistic octopus can't get it's greasy, cum-stained tentacles around your album and force it down consumer's throats...that might be the end of your career.

I believe this needless censorship is a manifestation of a deeply ingrained anti-American streak that runs right down the moral center of Wal-Mart's corporate overlords and stockholders. Are they Commies? That might be a biting insult to Joe-Blow from East Dry Crotch Nebraska but Wal-Mart sells too much shit to be card-carrying Communists. Wait a minute, there's a reason I attached the above picture. Yachtzee! Hard-core Nazis! (shit, that rhymed!) Yep, they refuse to carry a Green Day album because Billie Joe might say "fuck" a few times but they do hawk some mighty fine Nazi memorabilia.

Now I'm looking at my W.W.L.D. bracelet (what would Lemmy do) and the gears are turning. The Nazis did make some really cool looking stuff. The skull is pretty bad-ass and what would rock n' roll or biker fashion do without the ubiquitous iron cross, Nazi hat or storm trooper helmet?

And now the location of that thin line: If you're going to peddle Nazi iconography then do you really have a right to censor art or even worse, censor The Black Crowes Amorica album cover?

Anyhow...here are some quotes from Green Day and Wal-Mart:

"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 can not offer the CD."  - Melissa O'Brien of Wal-Mart

"Wal-Mart's become the biggest retail outlet in the country, but they won't carry our record because they wanted us to censor it... There's nothing dirty about our record...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."  - Billie Joe Armstrong

"As the biggest record store in the America, they should probably have an obligation to sell people the correct art." - Mike Dirnt