Elon Musk slams Green Day after band changes lyric to call out Donald Trump
Elon Musk took issue with Green Day’s ‘MAGA’ lyric during a New Year’s Eve performance. (Getty)
Green Day changed the lyrics of their hit song “American Idiot”, to attack Donald Trump during a New Year’s Eve performance – and all the usual suspects, including Elon Musk, aren’t happy about it.
During Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest, Green Day’s lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong called out Trump supporters by changing the lyrics to the 2004 track from “I’m not part of a redneck agenda” – an attack on former Republican president George W Bush – to: “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda.”
MAGA stands for Make American Great Again and was widely used as a political slogan by Donald Trump and his supporters during the 2016 presidential election campaign and during his four years in the White House.
Needless to say, Trump supporters had a meltdown. Some claimed the band were part of the “propaganda machine” while others tried to brand them “irrelevant”.
Even billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk weighed in.
The owner of X/Twitter accused the band of going “from raging against the machine to milquetoastedly raging for it”.
But Green Day fans flocked to social media to share the live performance and laugh at the outrage.
Green Day have always been outspoken when it comes to politics, and they’ve never missed an opportunity to criticise former president Trump, who is the current frontrunner in the 2024 Republican presidential nomination race.
In 2016, Armstrong compared Trump to Adolf Hitler in an interview with Kerrang! magazine. The bisexual rock star said the “worst problem” with Trump were those who followed him.
“I actually feel bad for them, because they’re poor, working-class people who can’t get a leg up,” he said. “They’re pissed off, and he’s preyed on their anger.”
Armstrong then made the comparison to the Nazi dictator, saying: “He just said: ‘You have no options and I’m the only one, and I’m going to take care of it myself’. I mean, that’s f**king Hitler, man.”
At the 2016 American Music Awards, band members yelled: “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA”, during a performance of their song “Bang Bang”.
And, following the devastating Maui wildfires last year, the band created shirts with the word “nimrod” pasted over a mugshot of Trump and sold them to support the people affected by the tragedy in Hawaii.
The band also gave a Republican Texas senator a piece of their mind during their 2022 European tour when they performed in front of a banner that simply read: “F**k Ted Cruz.”
Armstrong even floated the idea that he would renounce his US citizenship after the conservative majority Supreme Court struck down Roe v Wade, the landmark decision that had established the right to abortion.
