Elon Musk Criticizes Green Day for Changing Lyrics to Attack MAGA Agenda
During a televised show on New Year’s Eve, the lead singer of Green Day, Billie Joe Armstrong, altered a line in one of their hit songs “American Idiot” to criticize former president Donald Trump and his followers. He replaced “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda” with "I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda.” This provoked a backlash on social media, where the world’s wealthiest person, Elon Musk, slammed the band for going “from raging against the machine to milquetoastedly raging for it”. Trump’s supporters, who adopted his slogan “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) in his 2016 presidential campaign, were also outraged by the move.
The lyric change happened in Los Angeles and was broadcasted on ABC’s “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve”. It was the latest in a string of anti-Republican protests from the band, who first released “American Idiot” as a commentary on the “confusion” of the world under the George W. Bush administration in 2004. Green Day was a trending topic on X, the former name of Twitter, on Monday morning, where some accused them of “selling out” to “ensure they are DNC compliant” and Citizen Free Press, a conservative news site, called Armstrong “not a punk rocker but just another tired, listless vessel for the corporate political agenda.”
The band has a history of making political statements—Green Day chanted “No Trump! No KKK! No fascist USA!” on stage at an American Music awards show that occurred days after Trump’s 2016 election victory, Armstrong in 2020 accused Trump of “holding half of the country hostage” and in August the band sold limited edition merchandise that featured the former president’s mugshot and called him the “ultimate Nimrod,” a reference to the band’s 1997 “Nimrod” album cover. “I f**king hate Donald Trump so much,” Billie Joe Armstrong said to an audience at a Cannes Lions performance in 2018. “I used to scream ‘I hated George Bush.’ This one is a little different. This one is bad, it’s like acid gone bad.”