“Would be fun”: The singer Billie Joe Armstrong would love to work with
The art behind any good legacy musician is not to stop learning from newer artists. It’s easy for the classic rock grandpas of the world to shout at the new kids on the block to get off of their lawn, but if they bothered to check them out, a lot is going on underneath the surface that’s probably worth investing some time into. For Billie Joe Armstrong, though, he never concerned himself with being the punk elder statesman. He was listening all the time and would gladly play music with anyone.
Then again, it’s not like Armstrong didn’t know exactly where the younger generation is coming from, either. By the time Green Day were putting out their first official records, Armstrong had barely grown out of puberty, and listening through some of their early albums, you can hear him and Mike Dirnt slowly trying to piece together what their sound was going to be in the age of Nirvana and Pearl Jam.
But when someone gets their big break that young, it’s only a matter of time before the suits try to find someone else to ride their coattails. Green Day may not have wanted to be the faces of what pop-punk was supposed to be, but listening back to the way that they made records, it was always done in service to the song rather than the billions of offshoots that were trying to learn basic chords and sound whiny to reach the big time.
While many people have looked back on pop-punk with a bit of embarrassment these days, it’s not like there aren’t great moments to come out of the new revival either. In the same way that we had to deal with groups like Simple Plan alongside Green Day, Olivia Rodrigo is one of the few artists learning to embrace that style without having to go to Machine Gun Kelly levels of shallow.
Compared to every other pop-punk artist that has come out in the meantime, Rodrigo genuinely seems to love that kind of music whenever she plays tracks like ‘Good 4 U’. She never saw the genre as her core identity, either, so it was easy for her to channel anyone from Hayley Williams to Alanis Morissette to Taylor Swift depending on which track she was working on at any given time.
“Sometimes you can see how someone is interested in what punk rock is, and maybe they don’t quite have some of the influences or knowledge that I have on the history of punk rock. I’m kind of an encyclopedia. To do something with someone like Olivia Rodrigo would be fun.”
Billie Joe Armstrong
Armstrong has been much more content to keep things going with Green Day, but he doesn’t exactly rule out the possibility of collaborating with Rodrigo, either, saying, “I think it would be fun to work with her sometime. She’s talented. Sometimes you can see how someone is interested in what punk rock is, and maybe they don’t quite have some of the influences or knowledge that I have on the history of punk rock. I’m kind of an encyclopedia. To do something with someone like Olivia Rodrigo would be fun.”
Then again, there’s a good chance that Armstrong also sees the same kind of rebellious spirit he had when someone tried to put him in a creative box in the late 1990s. Everyone was convinced that all Green Day sang about was masturbation and smoking weed, but whereas they needed an album like American Idiot to announce their new direction, Rodrigo is the kind of person who does the exact same thing within the span of one album.
It’s not exactly eccentric in the same way that a band like Radiohead are or anything, but the need to branch out on both Armstrong and Rodrigo’s part is a good indication of where music is currently heading. Anyone can spend their time playing one genre of music, but it’s sometimes more fun to make something that’s a bit more genre-fluid.
