Green Day at Music for America's Icon Awards
On Thursday night, political non-profit organization Music For America presented their inaugural Icon Awards to honor influential musicians, outstanding political achievement, and social responsibility. Honorees included Gavin Newsom, Green Day, Death Cab For Cutie, Oakland-based Youth Movement Records, Working Assets, and MFA Board Member Dan Lipski. With 60,000 members, Music for America endeavors to engage young people in politics through partnerships with musicians and music communities.
The event was emceed by Moon Zappa, who approached the stage while Kanye West's "Gold Digger" was playing and proceeded to get down in an embarrassing-mom kind of way. We laughed at her rather than with her, but her lack of pretense was endearing. (And we'll admit we read Moon's novel several years ago and enjoyed it.) Moon kept her good humor as she shuffled the audience through a scattered program of video clips and award presentations. Contrary to what the photo would have you believe, Mayor Newsom was not there when it came time to accept his award since he'd already been there and left. Earlier in the evening when we saw a gorgeous, statuesque brunette with cascading curly hair in line for the buffet, we turned to our friend and wondered "is that Gavin Newsom's girlfriend?" Judging by the venomous look Ms. Brunette flashed back at us, we realized our whisper was way louder than we thought and that maybe we were onto something! After commandeering the MFA liveblogger's laptop for a quick look at Sophia's photo, we realized it wasn't her. We so wanted to report CSI Plumpjack sighting.
Gail Zappa, wife of Frank, gave a speech that we missed most of due to recurring microphone problems, but we did catch the two books she recommended: The Nothing that Is : A Natural History of Zero by Robert and Ellen Kaplan and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins. Death Cab For Cutie didn't show up to the event, but they had a good excuse since they're on tour in Europe. The acceptance speech that they videotaped backstage from Brussels was a little lackluster both in its content (confused band members stammering a generic "thank you" into the camera) and its length (couldn't have been longer than 20 seconds?) After an introduction by Nirvana's Krist Novoselic, we were impressed to see that all three members of Green Day were there. Billie Joe expressed his excitement to attend an awards show "that actually has a #^$@ing purpose" and looked forward to when we can get the "racist, war-hungry, corporate fascists out of the White House" in 2008. But how do you really feel, Billie Joe?
MFA will be registering voters via text messaging in key Senate race states in 2006. For more information about volunteering, visit their website at MusicForAmerica.org.
Photos by Debra Zeller.Top photo, from left to right: Music for America Executive Director Molly Neitzel, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, MfA co-founder Dan Droller. Bottom photo: Green Day band members Mike Durnt, Billie Joe Armstrong, Tre Cool.