Why Brandon Flowers was “offended” by Green Day
Musicians and faux pas unfortunately go hand in hand, like automobiles and global warming; they are simply inextricable. Over the years, many notable artists have produced gaffes, leaving them and their bandmates publicly scratching their heads. One man familiar with this sticky situation is The Killers frontman Brandon Flowers, who has long been deemed one of the more clean-cut rockstars. Unsurprisingly, his blunder was not accomplished under the influence.
As the frontman of the Las Vegas band, Flowers has written some of the 21st century’s most successful songs in the likes of ‘Mr. Brightside’ – a ubiquitous hit that has been immensely popular since release – and indie floor fillers such as ‘Somebody Told Me’, ‘When You Were Young’ and ‘Bones’. The typical narrative surrounding the group is that their first two albums, 2004’s Hot Fuss and 2006’s Sam’s Town, are their finest efforts before they eventually became a more vanilla global powerhouse off the back of pop hits such as 2008’s ‘Human’.
While they have headlined Glastonbury twice and continue to be wildly successful with their recent foray into Americana and heartland rock, The Killers’ all-American essence isn’t for everybody. More indebted now to Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty than they are to Joy Division and Depeche Mode, two bands often mentioned in their early years, this unfailing American spirit was the source of Flowers’ greatest faux pas.
Rolling back the years to 2006, at the time, The Killers were one of the most prominent American bands in the indie resurgence. Yet, concurrently with this wave, punk and rock music was also widely popular, with longstanding heroes Green Day being one of the most prominent acts in this realm. Despite the odds being stacked against them at the end of the last millennium, their 2004 rock opera American Idiot was a global hit and renewed their career. The record saw the Californian trio resonate with a younger audience as they analysed the pitfalls of Bush Jr’s America and its turbulent period at the onset of the decade.
While the album will likely go down as their masterpiece, it was a polarising release. It irked proud Americans such as Flowers, who made it clear he was “offended” by Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool touring the world and poking fun at their native land and its stereotypical denizens. In a 2006 interview, Flowers explicitly questioned what he saw as calculated anti-Americanism on the record.
Unsurprisingly, the Mormon frontman particularly hated the title track. However, he took particular issue with the fact that they filmed the Bullet In a Bible DVD in England, the motherland of the Americans’ old oppressors.
“You have Green Day and ‘American Idiot’. Where do they film their DVD? In England,” Flowers told The Word. “A bunch of kids screaming ‘I don’t want to be an American idiot’, I saw it as a very negative thing towards Americans. It really lit a fire in me.”
He continued: “You have the right to say what you want to say and what you want to write about, and I’m sure they meant it in the same way that Bruce Springsteen meant ‘Born In The USA’ and it was taken wrongly, but I was really offended when I saw them do that.”
It was nothing more than a cheap stunt, Flowers added, before somewhat ham-fistedly plugging Sam’s Town as a better and more positive representation of America. A month after the comments were published, in a separate interview with Rolling Stone, The Killers frontman expressed regret at the unnecessary drama they caused for himself and his bandmates, whom he felt bad for.
Pointedly, though, the God-fearing vanilla merchant maintained his comments weren’t taken out of context. Questioning Green Day’s punk status, he suggested they should have made their DVD in front of The White House instead of baying English kids who didn’t understand the context.
