The punk song Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong said gets better with age: “It’s at our doorstep”
Being called a sell-out is one of the worst things a punk band can be called. But with Green Day, turning commercial somehow worked out in their favour.
With today’s oversaturated swirl of streaming, it’s easy for messages in music to get lost, if they’re even heard at all. Most people have turned a corner where they’re creating highly fan-curated campaigns instead of material for the masses.
But before all this, Green Day were that mouthpiece, anchoring politics in music before social media gave us more siloes than we can count. “I think it was easier to satirise George Bush because we didn’t have social media,” Billie Joe Armstrong told Vulture, discussing American Idiot and how it was a time before all “these billionaires” proved they’d rather “shoot a rocket into space than deal with the infrastructure we have here”.
All these issues have become more complicated and endlessly meme-able, obviously. But Green Day had their platform initially because they got commercial with it. They got heat for it, of course, as how can a punk band with true roots in punk ever make music that sells on such a big scale? But therein lies the paradox – that by blowing up, Green Day took their political grievances to big stages, leading a movement Armstrong didn’t even know he was ready for.
Cut to today, and in the age of new media, Green Day have become an image associated with convoluted messages. On the main stage at Coachella this year, the main headline was their so-called “beef” with Charli XCX, not them changing the lyrics to ‘Jesus of Suburbia’ to call attention to the suffering of Palestinian children. Which, come to think of it, seems absurd, considering the empire they built themselves on.
But those actually paying attention will know that not even media-hungry tabloid celebrity culture can really distort the purpose of Green Day. And Armstrong knows that because he sees it in his own heroes, in the music he constantly draws influence from. And he keeps his focus on what matters, maintaining authenticity by keeping his beliefs on the straight and narrow, not changing them to suit the zeitgeist. Like Morrissey, who recently claimed to be “apolitical”, no doubt impacted by the copious amounts of scrutiny for venturing in all sorts of wrong directions.
Saviors critics might have thought the current Green Day was a watered-down version, but if anything, it was anything but. Because even when politics takes a backseat, it’s always in the back of Armstrong’s mind. “America is not supposed to be about the cult of personality; we’re supposed to be about a group of people who are making laws that would make the American people’s lives easier and affordable,” he said. “Getting good jobs, getting good health care, protecting people from corporations taking advantage of them. I feel like we are completely lost on that, the real American ideal.”
He went on, saying how Dead Kennedys are still as good as they are because they’re timeless, because they wrote about things that still resonate today. Things that still reflect the perils of society, in ways much of Green Day’s music does, even if its lyrics are specifically anchored to a time and place in history. “I listen to Dead Kennedys records today, and Jello Biafra was a brilliant songwriter back then,” he concluded. “‘California Über Alles’, it’s now more like ‘America Über Alles’. It’s real and it’s at our doorstep, and we better do something about it.”
