Green Day targeted Elon Musk with a choice lyric change. One day before the Tesla founder attended Donald Trump’s inauguration, Green Day performed a show in Musk’s native South Africa.
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When the rock band took the stage at the Calabash South Africa Festival in Johannesburg, they delighted the crowd with a performance of their 2004 hit, “American Idiot.”
It wasn’t a by-the-book performance, though. When frontman Billie Joe Armstrong got to the part of the song where he’s supposed to sing “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda,” he changed the lyric to, “I’m not a part of the Elon agenda.”
Billie Joe changes the lyrics to American Idiot in South Africa to: I’m not a part of an Elon agenda #greenday pic.twitter.com/1RC5LgxAa3
— Green Day Inc. (@GreenDayInc) January 21, 2025
Musk is intimately involved in Trump’s agenda for his second term. The president tapped the tech giant to lead the newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency alongside Vivek Ramaswamy. However, Ramaswamy has since been removed from the role, leaving Musk as the sole head of the department.
Green Day has previously been vocal about its distaste for Trump and Musk, the latter of whom recently drew criticism when he appeared to do a Nazi salute at a post-inauguration rally. (Musk denied the hand gesture was a Nazi salute, and called the accusation a “dirty trick.”)
In a 2023 performance, Armstrong changed the same “American Idiot” lyric, this time to, “I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda.”
Musk fired back on X, writing, “Green Day goes from raging against the machine to milquetoastedly raging for it.”
Later, Green Day bassist Mike Dirnt spoke out about Musk’s tweet.
“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,” he told Rolling Stone. “Whatever. The song’s twenty years old, and we’re Green Day. What did you expect?”
Photo by Annie Lesser/imageSPACE/Shutterstock
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