Green Day have upset the world's richest man, MAGA supporters, and the Fox News network after tweaking the lyrics of American Idiot for a live TV performance to suggest that they are no fans of former president Donald Trump.
People who may have slept on the Californian punk band's “No Trump! No KKK! No fascist USA!” chant on-stage during a performance of Bang Bang at the 2016 American Music awards 12 days after the US election which brought Donald Trump to power, have expressed outrage that Billie Joe Armstrong changed the lyric "I'm not part of a redneck agenda" to "I'm not a part of the MAGA agenda" during the band's appearance on ABC’s Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve show.
'Remember when Green Day sang about going against the establishment, and now all they’re just cucks for the machine?' wrote one commentator on the band's Instagram page (formerly Twitter) page, while another comment on X, formerly Twitter - 'Green Day tried to prove they're still cool by changing their lyrics to slam the "MAGA agenda" on TV last night' - led platform owner Elon Musk, the world's richest person, to reply 'Green Day goes from raging against the machine to milquetoastedly raging for it'.
Elsewhere, media organisations and political commentators who may possibly have missed the subtly of lyrics such as "'Sieg Heil' to the President Gasman" on Holiday, a song the band performed on the same ABC TV show as 2009 melted into 2010, have called out the whole idea of music having any political message whatsoever. “People are so sick of being preached at about politics from rock bands” insisted one commentator on a FOX news 'debate', a comment which led Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello to post 'Is that so?'
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This wasn't even the first time that Green Day amended their American Idiot lyric, the band having previously done so during their appearance at the iHeartRadio Music Festival back in 2019.
The bad news for those offended by Billie Joe Armstrong's lyric change is that they're very likely to hear Green Day's frontman express similar sentiments throughout 2024. Following the release of The American Dream Is Killing Me, the first single released from their forthcoming 'SAVIORS' album, Armstrong revealed that he'd written the song “three or four years ago” but held off from including it on the band's 2020 album Father of All Motherfuckers, because it was “low-hanging fruit because we have just terrible politics and terrible division in [the] United States.”
“But this time, we brought it out and it felt like it was the perfect time for it. We got away from the politics for a while [because] we didn’t want to be like another pundit on CNN, finger-pointing."
'SAVIORS' is set for release on January 19 via Reprise/Warner.
Green Day goes from raging against the machine to milquetoastedly raging for it 🤣🤣January 1, 2024
Is that so? https://t.co/S41zMFqpGnJanuary 2, 2024
