It’s the little things…

I get annoyed when people who don’t know things about certain elements of pop culture write about said elements.* It’s a pet peeve. Consider this post over at Big Hollywood, by Pam Meister, in which she writes that Green Day “has been around since the late 1980s but only achieved mainstream commercial success with their 2004 album American Idiot.” This is, simply, incredibly wrong. She starts off an otherwise kind-of-reasonable post (the central point of which is that Wal Mart can’t censor Green Day because they’re not a government agency, they just make business decisions) with a statement that most casual music fans would at least understand to be wrong, even if they didn’t understand why it was specifically inaccurate. A quick search on the Internet would uncover some interesting facts. Like the fact that their first mainstream album was Dookie and it sold 10 million copies in the early ’90s. Or that the followup Insomniac went double platinum. Or that the single “Good Riddance (Time of your life)” was a huge radio hit and played on a variety of rock/soft rock/alternative stations across the country. These were all prior to American Idiot, which sold five million copies (half as many as Dookie, mind you).

All of this info is available to anyone interested in searching for it via a 5 second Google search. I mean, it’s right there! And this is a post written by someone who had aspirations to be a DJ. For the love of God…

*For example, you will never find me writing about the following topics without doing some heavy research beforehand: country music; MTV’s “Road Rules”; the Gilded Age; Bollywood. There are probably others, but off the top of my head, that’s a good start.