Official footage of Green Day‘s controversial New Year’s Rockin’ Eve performance has been shared online – check it out below.
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To ring in 2024, the band played a set as part of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve – hosted by Ryan Seacrest.
The gig then hit headlines when the band’s lead singer, Billie Joe Armstrong, altered the ‘American Idiot’ lyric “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda” to hit out at Donald Trump, singing: “I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda”.
Many including Elon Musk then criticised the gesture, with the X/Twitter boss saying: “Green Day goes from raging against the machine to milquetoastedly raging for it.”
Green Day goes from raging against the machine to milquetoastedly raging for it
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 1, 2024
Another to hit out at the band following the performance was Lara Trump, the daughter-in-law of the former president, who said on her TV show The Right View that Armstrong’s choice to change the lyric was “not punk rock” and that the singer was “controlled by the corporate political agenda”.
“He was singing the song ‘American Idiot’, couldn’t help himself, had to get woke, had to get anti-Trump,” she added. “These people are so controlled by the mainstream, they are so controlled by the corporate political agenda.”
See footage from the band’s performance – including the altered ‘American Idiot’ rendition – below.
The NYE performance was the latest in a long line of anti-Trump moves from Green Day. At the American Music Awards (AMA) in 2016, the legendary punk trio led a chant of “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA” in protest against the then-President electoral candidate.
In August last year, the band announced a limited-time sale of a t-shirt featuring Donald Trump‘s mugshot for charity. The t-shirt, titled Ultimate Nimrod, used Trump’s viral mugshot to recreate their iconic ‘Nimrod’ cover, with the album’s title covering Trump’s face.
Green Day are next set to release their forthcoming album ‘Saviors’, via Warner/Reprise on January 19. The album is led by the singles ‘The American Dream Is Killing Me’, ‘Look Ma, No Brains!’ and ‘Dilemma’.
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