Basket Case: Billie Joe Comes Unglued

Green Day’s Dookie was the first album I ever bought. Even 18 years later, I still remember walking out of Blockbuster Music in Atlanta with the CD in hand and immediately turning over the booklet to my Dad so he could read the lyrics and highlight the songs I couldn’t listen to (which was the majority of the record – I listened anyway.) Dad would’ve needed to break out the highlighter this weekend for vocalist Billie Joe Armstrong’s profanity-laden tirade at the iHeartRadio Music Festival (NSFW.)While the band had a valid gripe (their set was cut short by 20 minutes), Armstrong’s drunken outburst smacks of an orchestrated PR stunt – and considering it’s dominated the news cycle since, it appears to have worked.

The key with picking out publicity stunts is timing. On the surface, Billie Joe’s meltdown appeared sincere and borne of frustration with Clear Channel Communications’ mismanagement of the music festival. Add in free PBR and a microphone and you’ve got yourself a punk rock powder keg and front-page news. The undercurrent in this scenario is that Green Day released their new album ¡Uno! today, a mere 72 hours after they stormed offstage in Las Vegas. See the correlation here?

Unless someone spills the beans on whether or not the ordeal was legitimate, we are left only to speculate; but stunt or not, Billie Joe’s behavior is reverberating throughout the pop-culture arena, and I’m willing to bet they’ll see a bit of a spike in initial album sales as an outcome.

Coordinated publicity moves are viewed by many as tacky and a direct insult on intelligence, but it does not mean that they don’t yield results. Effective PR involves having your name on the tops of peoples’ minds; becoming a topic of conversation. While all publicity stunts don’t necessarily need to be as messy and profane, Green Day is Monday water cooler fodder because of the events at the iHeartRadio Music Festival. It always boils down to frequency and repetition: as your name circulates, the more your odds for success increase.

So, a smashed singer and a smashed Gibson guitar later, and the happenings over the weekend are now woven into the pop-culture tapestry forever. Whether an inebriated tantrum or stroke of genius, pundits, bloggers and radio hosts will continue to discuss Billie Joe’s actions, and when the numbers come back on album sales, he just may be whistling Basket Case all the way to the bank.

 

-Carter Breazeale

PR/PR Public Relations