Green Day lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong successfully managed to insult tens of millions of Trump supporters ringing in the New Year by likening them to rednecks when he changed the lyrics of his song “American Idiot” to emphasize his disgust for the 45th president’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement.
The incident occurred during the band’s performance on ABC’s Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest when Mr. Armstrong replaced the original line, “I’m not part of the redneck agenda,” with ”I’m not part of the MAGA agenda.”
“Green Day goes from raging against the machine to milquetoastedly raging for it,” the Tesla/SpaceX CEO wrote.
Many others roasted the group, with one X poster describing them as “punk rock sellouts.”
The punk rock pop-punk band first gained popularity in 1994 and has long spoken out about their contempt for the former president and reality star.
In 2019, the band debuted the anti-MAGA line in “American Idiot” at the iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas. It was at the 2016 American Music Awards that Green Day took aim at the then-president-elect while performing “Bang Bang,” where Mr. Armstrong repeated a common leftist chant at the time, “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA.”
Conservative Artist Canceled for Political Opinion
Meanwhile, conservative singers like Jason Aldean have suffered cancellation by entertainment companies and news outlets for lyrics that were not changed during a live performance in front of millions of viewers.In July 2023 Mr. Aldean’s new single shot up to the iTunes top spot after Country Music Television pulled the song’s music video in response to some media outlets’ criticism of the three-minute clip, describing it as having “racist and pro-gun lyrics.”
The video, “Try That In a Small Town,” showed leftist violence and lawlessness and included real-life scenes of rioters around the country wreaking havoc during the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis in May of 2020. The song suggests in the lyrics that those who “carjack an old lady at a red light,” “pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store,” “cuss out a cop spit in his face,” or “stomp on the flag and light it up” to “try that in a small town” and “see how far ya make it down the road.”
Multiple media outlets ran negative pieces on the video.
A story in the Daily Beast was headlined “Jason Aldean Catches Heat for Racist, Pro-Gun Lyrics: ‘a Modern Lynching Song,’” while Newsweek ran a piece titled, “Jason Aldean’s New Song Sparks Outrage Over Guns - ‘Very Scary Lyrics.’”
“There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it - and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage - and while I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music - this one goes too far.”
