Rolling Stone’s 2008 Hot Issue spotlights acts like Band of Horses and Vampire Weekend, but more on that later. For the next week, we’ll be taking a look at Hot Issue hits and misses from the past twenty-one years (because nobody’s cultural thermometer is accurate all the time).
Hit: In 1994, Rolling Stone proclaimed a little trio called Green Day Hot Band. The NoCal punk act cooled off a tad in the late Nineties with Nimrod and Warning, but with 2004’s American Idiot Billie Joe Armstrong and Co. cemented their status as one of the biggest bands recording today (the LP went platinum five times and won an armful of VMAs and a Grammy for Best Rock Album). The band got politically aware in its later years, too, which makes the opening line of the 1994 story pretty amusing in hindsight: “Beavis and Butt-head have started a band: It’s called Green Day.”
Miss: By contrast, 1998’s Hot Band was Sarge. Who? Exactly. The excellent (but still under-the-radar) indie-rock trio split in 2000 just before their final album, Distant, came out.


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