VH1, An American Idiot

Last weekend I caught Green Day’s Storytellers on VH1. First, I love that they seem to be bringing this series back. From what I understand there is a Springsteen episode in the works and I can’t wait for that. Second, I hate VH1 and the way they seem to be raping the artists integrity and ruining what was once a really good series.

In the Story tellers of old the artist would answer questions about a song and then play the song, often times in an acoustic format. It was a great opportunity to see natural, flowing dialogue paired with organic, spur of the moment, music.

The new Storytellers series seems to have abandoned this format in favor of a more commercial, MTV friendly version. The band played an electric set of the entire American Idiot album and then filmed a short little Q&A. When the show aired VH1 spliced snippets of the Q&A session over the solos during the live show. Consequently no answer was longer than 20 seconds and the artistic integrity of the songs were seriously violated. Any musician puts a solo into a song because they feel like it will fit nicely into the song and create an emotion, not because it’ll make a good place to put a sound clip over the top of.

The Green Day performance itself was really good. As weird as it is to admit, Billy Joe Armstrong has become one of the most compelling front men in the business. He has loads of energy but never compromises the songs with it. Yet in spite of the great performance I left with a sour taste in my mouth thanks to VH1. But I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything else.