What’s more punk than selling out?
Summary
Green Day’s partnership with Keurig doesn’t mean punk is dead. Just that the age-old practice of commodifying rebellion is alive and well.
In a perfect punk world, where the Dead Kennedys are bigger than the Beatles, the announcement that Green Day is joining forces with Keurig Dr Pepper would be met with howls.
The beverage behemoth recently released a “limited-edition brewer and coffee kit" to mark the 20th anniversary of “American Idiot," Green Day’s “punk rock opera," which skewered America’s post-9/11 jingoism and corporate greed. The kit, which includes a Keurig coffee machine, branded tumbler and some K-cup pods, retails for $159.99. Released in August, it’s already sold out.
The surface incongruity of this pairing is jarring. The scruffy rockers of Green Day (Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool) are so subversive that they sing in Cockney accents and have a drummer with a French name, despite being from the Bay Area. Keurig Dr Pepper is a confusingly named Vermont-Texas, coffee-soft drink conglomerate with an annual revenue north of $14 billion.
Although Green Day was one of the first punk bands of the ‘90s to sign with a major record label and make famous the oft-maligned subgenre of “pop-punk" (where the ambition is right there in the name), there was a time when that wouldn’t have been enough to stem the cries of “sell out!" Now the band’s foray into caffeinated merchandising evokes eye rolls, if it’s noticed at all.
Contempt for “selling out" was once a defining feature of punk rock. A raucous and more aggressively insolent sort of rock ’n’ roll, invented by the Peruvian band Los Saicos in 1964 and popularized by the sneering Sex Pistols in the U.K. in the ‘70s, punk has gone through countless cycles of death and rebirth. But a foundational principle was always an aversion to mainstream power and commerce. For acolytes, the notion of punks doing punk things for money was heresy.
Such idealism has proven impractical. That companies might want to commodify a youth culture predicated on catchy tunes and hotties in leatherette is hardly shocking. That even the punkest of rockers may have material desires and expenses is also unsurprising. The Clash’s 1979 song “Death or Glory" warned against “digging gold from rock ’n’ roll." By 1991, the band’s hit single “Should I Stay or Should I Go" was shilling Levi’s denim.
Plenty of purists were still around at the time and were duly aghast. They were also horrified by the rise of the Vans Warped Tour, a traveling shoe commercial stocked with pop-punk acts, which began pandering to impressionable suburban tweens in 1995.
But by 2003, when Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life" was in an ad for Royal Caribbean, critics could muster only some sardonic “maybe he can now buy a shirt" jokes. By the time Country Life butter ran ads in the U.K. starring former Sex Pistol John Lydon in 2008, the response was bemused shrugs. Lydon was unapologetic. “They turned my life around," he said of Country Life. “I’ve got butter to thank for it and I’ve eaten plenty since."
When Keurig first announced its partnership with Green Day, some quipped that punk was finally and truly dead. Actually, few fans seem to care. After all, if cynicism is a kind of wisdom, then perhaps it’s inevitable that those who rail against the system will also hope to be its beneficiaries. Who can blame them?
There are still plenty of punk bands playing garages and basements, swearing they’ll never use their screaming to sell butter. But punk was designed for speed, not long-term planning, and at some point everyone has to pay rent. Idealism, after all, is for hippies.
The tangible value of punk’s antiestablishment views was actually there at the start. The Sex Pistols might have remained niche had the BBC not banned their provocative song “God Save the Queen" from the airwaves in 1977. The single duly rose to #2 on the U.K. charts. By 2015 Virgin Money launched a line of credit cards featuring iconic Sex Pistols record covers. “It’s time for consumers to put a little bit of rebellion in their pocket," the bank announced at the time.
As punk pushes 60, there’s something heartening about its hypochondriac obsession with its own breathing. The fact that the genre is still posing existential questions—Who’s punk? What’s punk? Is it over?—should be seen as evidence of its vitality. So, no, punk is not dead. Thanks to Keurig’s new K-cups, it’s not even sleeping.
Zachary Lipez is Editor at Large for CREEM, author of the Abundant Living newsletter the singer for the band Publicist UK.
