What’s more punk than selling out?
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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. 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.
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