Green Day talked with The Sun in a new wide ranging interview:
Mike says: “Social media is great for kids but if you’re finding your music via algorithms then that’s just fing lazy. I like to organically find new things. All I can say is just f***ing clear your search history to find new s***.” Tre laughs: “We say this now but as soon as we hang up, we’ll be making a TikTok account.”
Billie Joe adds: “I was told that Brain Stew was a sudden popular thing on TikTok with a lot of hip-hop kids dancing to it. And that’s cool. But I don’t have the patience to use it. It’s just like, eurgh. It’s cool for other people but we’re old- school man.”
That is why you won’t find the passionate and outspoken songwriiter venting on social media.
Billie Joe says: “My opinions are always in my songs. I don’t like to Tweet or Instagram about politics, because you’re contributing to insane people who are just bitching, arguing and taking sides. So I write about it in my songs. It’s funny as on New Year’s Eve, we played American Idiot [on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve show] and we changed ‘redneck agenda’ to MAGA agenda’ [Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan]. Well, I woke up the next morning to people saying, ‘F***ng blah blah I can’t believe he said it’ or ‘it’s so awesome’ which was crazy. And then it’s on Fox News and Elon Musk and Tom Morello are saying things about it. But it threw me as we’d pre-taped the show a month before and I’d forgotten about that lyric change. On actual New Year’s Eve, we were in our cover band, The Coverups, raising money for a chimpanzee sanctuary so I was like, ‘Hey what are you talking about? I was raising money for chimps’.”