The subliminal mindf**k America: Green Day and the pitfalls of anti-establishmentarianism
A commentary on the Saviors Tour, the punk ethos, and selling out. They were right: the Jesus of Suburbia was a lie.
Ellie Montemayor–The Tech
The Saviors Tour
Green Day
Fenway Park
August 7, 2024
“This is not a party... This is a celebration.”
Please check your bag with security. Scan your ticket at this scanner. Go through a scanning machine. Your seats are on grandstand 24, row 11, seats 9–10. Form an orderly line as you make your way to your seats. Please wait patiently as the next act comes to the stage.
On Wednesday, August 7, a spirit of delinquent rebellion descended upon Boston as a sea of red and black tore through the streets to converge in Fenway Park. Plaid skirts, studded leather, and cigarette smoke overran the cramped rows of the so-called “Cathedral of Baseball” in attendance for a sermon from the punk scene’s biggest preachers: worldwide phenomenon and punk-rock elder statesman Green Day.
The band, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and a veteran of the ’90s Bay Area punk scene, is currently on a world tour to support the release of their most recent album Saviors, which premiered in January earlier this year to general acclaim. Their tour, which celebrates the 20th and 30th anniversaries of albums American Idiot (2004) and Dookie (1994), began in Spain at the end of May, with the United States leg ongoing through the end of September.
Boston’s concert was opened by newcomer all-female group The Linda Lindas, fellow punk veteran Rancid, and underground alt-rocker The Smashing Pumpkins. The five-hour-long concert began at 5 p.m. with the three opening acts, though Green Day did not make their much-anticipated appearance until nightfall.
Following two interludes, the first with a stadium-wide singalong to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and the second with what essentially amounts to a drag performance of the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” by longtime costumed mascot Punk Bunny, the main act was finally set to perform.
After a hedonistic minute-long musical introduction—via a recorded remix-mashup of iconic rock themes like instrumental leitmotif “The Imperial March” and Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” played on speaker alongside wild ’90s-type graphics that echoed themes from the band’s numerous albums—Green Day came to the stage with a piercing metallic riff and opened their act with Saviors’ lead single “The American Dream Is Killing Me,” immediately setting the rapid fire pace that would headline the rest of their two-and-a-half-hour set.
And on cue to the band’s hotly awaited appearance, the entire audience rose in a reverberating wave across the stadium—as if to pledge allegiance to God and country. Instead, fealty was sworn unflinchingly to the anthem of revolution.
“I want to see everybody jumping up and down,” frontman Billie Joe Armstrong screamed in the middle of the song and ahead of its iconic guitar solo, as the audience of thousands erupted into an unrelenting frenzy.
The setlist opener would be one of only five songs the band played from Saviors, all of which were pulled as singles ahead of the album’s release. Three (“Look Ma, No Brains!”, “One Eyed Bastard,” and “Dilemma”) were placed squarely in Act II of the concert between Dookie and American Idiot, with punchy love song “Bobby Sox” reserved for the encore. (My favorite part of the Dookie era-esque song is in the chorus-switching notes between “girlfriend” and “boyfriend” as sung by Armstrong, who identifies as bisexual.)
On a deeply vacuous, cosmetic level (more on that later), the concert was an absolute blast. Dookie and American Idiot are my two favorite Green Day albums, absolute staples of both herds in the punk scene: one a pissed-off breed of self-centered brooding hoodlums sick of their bland life, and the other an anarchist movement of anti-establishment rebels actually doing something about it.
And the band absolutely delivered. Throughout the setlist’s 37 songs—the majority of the concert’s runtime was dedicated to playing in full Dookie and American Idiot, successively—and the many dizzying visuals that accompanied their frantic playing, I was stood up, flailing around and screaming wildly for the entirety of their set.
The band blasted off song after song with barely a pause. It was an exhilarating experience, one that was manifestly grounded on the synergetic relationship between act and audience. I was blown away by the sheer energy of the stadium that night, with the band’s bewitching personality magnetizing each and every minute of the set. (I particularly recall the impassioned transition between “Brain Stew” from Insomniac (1995) and the opening riff of the band’s magnum opus “American Idiot,” where the crowd—myself included—went absolutely berserk.)
In keeping with Green Day’s eclectic musical style and the extensive amounts of copyright infringement already committed on-set even before they went up on stage, Armstrong intros snippets from other rocker spaces to hype up slower-starting songs like “Pulling Teeth” from Dookie (introduced by Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline”) and “Brain Stew” (introduced by Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man”).
In the same vein, I also commend the sped-up run of Warning's “Minority” (2000) near the beginning of Act II—Armstrong has previously said that he prefers live playings of the song to its original studio recording, and the band has frequently accelerated its tempo and rock-driven overtones while live—which swaps out the chart-topper’s folk rock undertones with a more aggressive and electric color.
Armstrong addressed the crowd many times across the show and definitely personalizes the set for the venue; he’s earned a reputation as a bit of an “arena preacher,” as some reviewers describe him, with his sermon-like onstage banter and megachurch pastoral personality. (“The representative from Massachusetts has the floor,” a spoken segment from American Idiot’s “Holiday” goes, swapping out the original “California” line with the Bay State). Singalongs, motion commands, and ad-libbing were peppered through the set to keep the crowd running alongside the band’s heart-racing pace. And Armstrong commented on the crowd’s phone use in the middle of his set—“Put the phone away. Let’s be here right now!” he says during a rendition of “Longview.” But phones at times still littered the crowd, and they were warmly held aloft towards the end of the set, flashlights shining through the thick sea of people, as power ballad “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” (American Idiot) was sung.
At one point, Armstrong even brought up an audience member to assist with their playing of 21st Century Breakdown’s “Know Your Enemy” (2009), giving up the reins for part of the song to a fan who effortlessly excited the crowd with an energy much like his own. (The impromptu invitation, which has gone both quite well and quite poorly from venue to venue, was astoundingly well-delivered in the Boston showing—which I was unsurprised by with the person pulled on stage dressed head-to-toe like Armstrong, black-and-red costuming and frazzled rocker hair and all.)
But honestly, as with all the band’s attention-grabbing antics, the visual production made half the show: the entire set, as per standard operating procedure from a mainstream rock act, was plastered with a phantasmagoria of flashing lights, budget-slashing practical effects, and epilepsy-inducing color changes.
In both the on-set effects (from the blow-up mushroom cloud ripped from Dookie’s cover art and the corresponding inflatable bomber plane that made a lap around the field, to the ambient smokescreens and pyrotechnics) and the messy ’90s-era hyper-edited visuals blown up on the stadium jumbotrons, my senses were blown thrice-over. For American Idiot’s part, a blow-up of the album’s iconic grasped hand grenade and accompanying Russian constructivism-influenced war propaganda predicated the punk rock opera’s onslaught of political imagery.
When the energy of the day died down and the smoke evaporated away, Armstrong was left alone onstage with an acoustic guitar and one more song left in him. “For what it’s worth, it was worth all the while,” he sang alongside the crowd, ending the band’s show with their staple closer “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” from Nimrod (1997).
Were this a standard review and were I a standard arts and culture reviewer, the poetic goodbye and the climactic curtain call is where I would leave off. But my interest in Green Day pushes further than what a press ticket and complimentary drinks could buy. (I did not, in fact, get press tickets for this show; I, instead, shelled out $366 pre-tax for two crap grandstand seats by home plate, somewhere in the ballpark of 400–500 feet away from the stage.)
So first, I put the spotlight on the leading man himself: Billie Joe Armstrong. The 52-year-old who founded Green Day nearly forty years ago has developed a rather eccentric onstage persona for himself over the years, blending his underground punk roots with the personality of a classic rock act.
Armstrong has appropriated a necessarily Beatle-esque persona to fuel his onstage presence, evident in his various mannerisms that at times feel almost airlifted from John Lennon’s Fab Four years. (I mean—hell, Green Day literally reinvented themselves to be the Beatles reborn.) Armstrong fundamentally feels like a born-again Beatle with the babyish face of a Paul McCartney pulled from the promo clip of “Hey Jude” (1968) and the soul of a Vietnam War-era John Lennon... and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.
(Other aspects of Armstrong’s image are also pulled from Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, whose iconic “Hey-Oh!” riffs and unique onstage charm find their way in Armstrong’s concert persona.)
But this enormous personality big enough to fill a stadium, while easy to be mesmerized by, silently kills the “band” out of the band. The invitation was never extended to Armstrong’s bandmates, whose limelight presence—both onstage and elsewhere—have always been deeply overshadowed by his headstrong, controlling (and at times McCartney-esque) persona.
The name Billie Joe Armstrong, though rationalizable to an extent as the band’s frontman, is synonymous with the name Green Day; and I can barely even recall his bandmates’ names. (The band’s co-founder Mike Dirnt acts as its bassist and backing vocalist, and longtime member Tré Cool acts as its drummer.) It’s evident in the Boston concert when neither bandmate is allowed a single spoken line or piece of banter throughout the show, aside from their drowned-out backing vocals in some songs and Cool’s forgettable ditty (“All by Myself”) at the end of Dookie.
Armstrong is the irreverent symbol of Green Day’s cultural revolution. And here’s the thing: punk has a long history of iconoclastic morality. I suppose that was just lost in translation for Green Day fans when the group went mainstream.
Case in point: American Idiot’s “St. Jimmy,” quite possibly the most autoerotic three minutes in the entire setlist. The song itself is emblematic of classic punk themes of drugs, crime, and sex and musically harkens back to old-school Green Day, but what makes its appearance in the concert so peculiar is how self-important it feels. Bits of the operatic story in American Idiot already seep into various parts of the concert’s second act, but this song is where Armstrong’s personal relationship with the album manifests true to form.
The song’s live rendition is cued in with Armstrong holding aloft a mock-up of the heart-shaped hand grenade in a startling recreation of the album cover—all while the hand grenade blow-up remains set behind the band. Red streamers exploding in the air, gratuitous amounts of pyrotechnics, and exalting fans chanting along to the manic deification of the self-described “patron saint of the denial” rock an increasingly frenzied atmosphere. And in a jolting end to what essentially amounts to a three-minute episode of bipolar psychosis, Armstrong lifts his arms halfway to the sky, amidst a sea of cheers and praise, as the white lights dim to leave only him illuminated in a smoky haze. (Thematically, and given the album’s and the song’s over punk-prophetic themes, I am more than passingly reminded of Christ the Redeemer.)
(Armstrong, by the way, literally plays the character St. Jimmy—a psychic manifestation of a psychotic drug-dealing crusty punk—in the rock musical adaptation of American Idiot for 76 of its 422 performances. In the album’s narrative, Jimmy acts as the wayward split persona of the disaffected protagonist Jesus of Suburbia and guides him to a self-destructive life of deviant hedonism; Jimmy’s raving creation and self-canonization in the story comes at a point of the Jesus of Suburbia’s spiral into deep depression.)
Idolism, essentially, is the name of the game. I hark back to “Know Your Enemy,” where a teenage rocker-to-be giddily crushed it onstage while in a very thorough cosplay of Armstrong. I can only assume that more fans riding the rail and in varying degrees of costuming collectively balked at their missed opportunity for brief stardom. (Although I’m not hoping to sour what was a greatly liberating event for many in attendance, I was at times perturbed by the avid waves of subscription to this one group and their one message—and I will suitably appropriate the following phrase from American Idiot’s “Holiday” here: “Hear the dogs howlin’ out of key / To a hymn called ‘Faith and Misery’”—from people who are supposed to espouse against idolatry and influence.)
Part of me also finds fault with the very idea of a sold-out, big-ticket concert in the punk scene. A necessarily underground, incendiary, anti-establishment cultural movement that is drawn out from the forgotten nooks and crannies of the big city like moths to a flame—Fenway Park’s 40,000-seater stadium, VIP package options, and Ticketmaster surge pricing is just not what we are supposed to stand for. There is a level of validation in seeing thousands like me all pledging fealty to the anthem of revolution, I will acknowledge, but I still can’t help but feel affronted by the idea of fealty itself.
And well outside of the concert, there’s something deeply uncomfortable about the band’s unexpected Keurig collaboration on an American Idiot-themed coffee brewer kit that’s touted by the mainstream media as “the most punk rock thing [they’ve] ever seen” (which was randomly announced early this month in the midst of the Saviors Tour’s North American leg). The product went live on the company’s digital storefront on August 20 for a cool $160, only the most recent drop against years of random corporate collaborations. And I just have to ask: why?
In the midst of all this, I paid over $400 to see Green Day in concert, including a $45 American Idiot t-shirt I just had to get—all-in-all, that’s in the ballpark of three limited edition American Idiot-themed Keurig brewer kits!—which essentially means that I coughed up a week’s worth of full-time minimum wage to the corporate regime to scream my heart out against the corporate regime. The mark of corporate greed is splattered all over Fenway Park as we make our half-hearted attempts to reclaim the storied establishment, all to put the establishment on blast.
(“Everyone’s so full of sh*t,” Armstrong sings in Part III of American Idiot’s “Jesus of Suburbia.” I’ll have to agree, B.J.)
“The American Dream Is Killing Me,” since its debut as a single just under a year ago, quickly took on as one of Green Day’s most iconic and anthemic protest songs alongside “Know Your Enemy,” “Minority,” and pretty much the entirety of American Idiot. Here is where I was almost immediately enthralled by the fantasies of political dissent, and here is where I was summarily disappointed.
“I’m so sick—we are sick of the propaganda and the lies and the algorithms that we have to witness every single day,” Armstrong evangelizes in a spoken interlude in the middle of “Letterbomb” from American Idiot. “Because tonight... Tonight is the truth!”
But what is that “truth” exactly? I’m not sure. Armstrong makes brief mention of the concert’s opening acts as “the truth!” and additionally declares the night as “about love and joy and hope,” but the overt messaging I had come to expect from the band felt absent and lackluster.
There have been moments where Armstrong has generated controversy onstage in the past for his human rights sentiments as well as anti-conservative and anti-Trump messaging alongside the band’s anarchist-leaning protest songs—and Armstrong to his credit does follow suit for the Boston set with a switch-up of “American Idiot”’s “redneck agenda” line with “I’m not part of a MAGA [Make America Great Again] agenda,” which has been a frequent lyrical variation of the song since 2019.
Another major line frequently switched up from venue to venue hails from a verse in Part III of the nine-minute American Idiot musical suite “Jesus of Suburbia”; the original line reads, “We are the kids of war and peace / From Anaheim to the Middle East.” (The line is meant to link groups of disillusioned youths from vastly different experiences—for example, residents of Anaheim, California, home of the Disneyland Resort, and the war-torn region surrounding the Arabian Peninsula—who all inevitably turn to the same themes of political dissidence.) I was quite disappointed to hear the line sung in the Boston concert only as, “From Boston to the Middle East.”
(I also hand-inspected live renditions of the line via fan recordings of around two dozen concerts from October 2023 through the middle of this month, finding several variations that highlight diverse political themes—which I quizzically noted were all absent coverage or mention by every mainstream media outlet that reviewed each corresponding concert. A mid-October 2023 show in Vegas sees Armstrong singing “From Vegas to Palestine,” followed up with two pre-Saviors Tour April 2024 concerts as “From Gaza to the USA” (San Francisco and Los Angeles) and two June tour sets in France sung “From UK to Gaza” and “From Gaza and the Middle East,” in clear references to the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict. An early August set in Montreal also has him sing the line as “From Israel to the Middle East.”
Other venue variations may be references to their host areas, such as “From España...” for the June 1 concert at Caja Mágica, “From Dublin...” for the June 27 concert at Marlay Park, and “From New York...” for the August 5 concert at Citi Field. But the most frequent variation that I was able to pick up on relates to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with around a third run as “From Ukraine to the Middle East.”)
Lyrical variations in Green Day’s already abrasive punk ethos anthems only point to the next target of the band’s scathing political indictments. So why bury the lede and let it remain unnoticed? Isn’t the point of a political message to broadcast it to the world, to call out the groveling lunacy of “idiot America”? For a passing moment, as I dug through recordings of recent concerts to track down the various renditions of “Jesus of Suburbia,” I felt somewhat more receptive to Green Day’s particular brand of political dissidence—yet I doggedly remain irritated at their refusal to turn to more direct and visible means of pushing their interpretation of punk anti-establishmentarianism.
Green Day had sweet-talked me into an image of them as the working class heroes of a new anarchist generation—but as someone whose politics runs quite leftist, much of the meta-messaging in the concert fell quite flat. Yes, American Idiot and the band’s early 21st century “leftism” may have made waves among the masses of 2004, but today, it’s par for the course. Yet mainstream reviews and appraisals continue to rave about protest and politics. (And I know this quite well: I analyzed countless articles, news snippets, and memoir-biography entries on the concert, the band, and their history while preparing my own critique on the matter.)
By and large, I am disappointed in the lack of present-day political messaging and theming to current events infused in the concert. The set, in all its sell-out glory, feels today like a dolled-up memorandum of vague and unspecified demurring from the status quo in an artificial attempt to reach the most diluted branches of the punk scene.
The world of today is in a turning point; we’re in the midst of a real revolution. What purpose do Green Day and their money-making machine have to people who need a real rallying cry?
Don’t get me wrong: I loved the concert. I love Green Day. I love their music, and I love what they stand for—I want to espouse nothing but adoration for the band that brought me into this brave new world of wrathful anti-establishmentarianism. But as I write the final words of this commentary, I’m confronted with the conflicting morals of the punk underground and the corporate machine that Green Day has long since attached itself to. And it feels laughable attempting to reconcile the band’s working-class roots and their current multi-millionaire status.
I’m glad to have “met” my idol, in a very loose sense of the word. But maybe I’m my own person, and I don’t need to be a black-shirt, red-tie, bleached-blonde caricature of him. Maybe I can be part of this movement in my own way.
“It’s something unpredictable / But in the end, is right / I hope you had the time of your life.”