Green Day have taken a shot at Elon Musk during a recent concert in South Africa – check out footage of the performance below.
On Sunday (January 19), Green Day performed their first show of the year at the FNB Stadium in Johannesburg, South Africa. While performing ‘American Idiot’, frontman Billie Joe Armstrong swapped out a portion of the song’s lyrics to take a jab at X (formerly Twitter) and Tesla owner Elon Musk.
Over the last year, Elon Musk – who is from Pretoria, South Africa – has been instrumental in Donald Trump‘s bid to return to the White House, championing him as the President of the United States. This has resulted in Musk being tasked to lead Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Armstrong sang during ‘American Idiot’, “I’m not a part of the Elon agenda“, notably swapping out the “redneck agenda” line. Check it out below.
The band’s lyric-change comes after Green Day on December 31, 2023 performed at the Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve gig and called out Donald Trump, similarly singing: “I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda”.
A couple of days later, Musk in early 2024 mocked the band for the edit, writing in an X post “Green Day goes from raging against the machine to milquetoastedly raging for it,” followed by a pair of crying with laughter emojis.
Green Day bassist Mike Dirnt retorted, per The Independent: “Elon Musk actually is the machine. I can’t take anything else from that. He’s not shy about saying stupid shit on the internet. Whatever. The song’s twenty years old, and we’re Green Day. What did you expect?”
Elon Musk has yet to respond to Green Day’s latest taunt.
Green Day’s late-2023 jab at Trump wasn’t the first time they had done so. 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 2023, 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.
In the lead-up to the 2024 US Presidential elections, Armstrong urgently encouraged fans to vote for Kamala Harris instead: “Vote for Harris. I think there’s probably a lot of things that people disagree with, but the one thing that we do agree on, is Trump has got to go and we need to turn the page.”