Green Day kicked off the Australian leg of their Saviors world tour over the weekend, one day after the infamous Oval Office blowup between Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The show featured a complete performance of their politically-charged 2004 rock opera American Idiot, giving them an opportunity to blast Trump, Vance, and Elon Musk.
“Don’t want politicians to shut the fuck up?,” Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong asked the crowd during “American Idiot.” “Don’t you want Elon Musk to shut the fuck up? Don’t you want Donald Trump to show the fuck up?”
Later in the night, Armstrong altered the lyrics of “Jesus of Suburbia” from “Am I retarded, or am I just overjoyed?” to “Am I retarded, or am I just JD Vance?” In that same song, Armstrong also sang, “We are the kids of war and peace/From Ukraine to the Middle East” as opposed to “We are kids of war and peace/From Anaheim to the Middle East.”
This is hardly the first time that Green Day have updated the lyrics to songs from American Idiot. When they played New Year’s Rockin’ Eve on December 31, 2023, they sang “I’m not part of a MAGA agenda” as opposed to “I’m not part of a redneck agenda.” Elon Musk responded with a Tweet the next morning: “Green Day goes from raging against the machine to milquetoastedly raging for it.”
A couple of weeks later, we asked Green Day bassist Mike Dirnt for his thoughts on Musk’s Tweet. “The song’s twenty years old, and we’re Green Day,” he said. “What did you expect? Come on. I think the best part about it is that it provoked conversation. It got people talking. First, it was rhetorical, and then it got into conversation. Anytime you can get people talking, you’re always going to have the loudest voices [heard first], and then everyone else in the room is going to figure out what it really means.”
Earlier this month, they played in South Africa, Musk’s birth country, and changed the “American Idiot” lyrics to “I’m not part of the Elon agenda.”
Green Day wrap up their Australian tour Wednesday night at C-Bus Super Stadium in Gold Coast. They then head to Mumbai, India, to headline Lollapalooza India on a bill that also includes Shawn Mendes, Glass Animals, Louis Tomlinson, and Zedd. They return to the States in April to perform at Coachella.
