Green Day fans have reacted to the band avoiding political statements during their set at the Super Bowl opening ceremony.
Earlier tonight (February 8), the band returned to their Bay Area home to kick off the 60th NFL setpiece with a medley of their biggest songs, as a rollcall of previous Super Bowl MVPs paraded on the Levi’s Stadium field.
They played ‘Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)’ and three tracks from ‘American Idiot’, including the title track, but there were no political comments from frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, and he even refrained from singing the tweaked lyric, “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda”, which has been present at recent shows.
This is despite the band playing an intimate warm-up show in San Francisco on Friday at which Armstrong called on any ICE agents in attendance to “quit their shitty ass job”, which is more in keeping with their long-running outspoken attitude to the Trump administration.
Official broadcaster NBC did mute Armstrong when he sang “The subliminal mindfuck America” during ‘American Idiot’, and it remains a possibility that any further comments were also edited out of the broadcast.
Some fans took to social media after the Super Bowl set to share their thoughts on the band avoiding politics while on the big platform. “Green Day had THE opportunity to be political and they rested on ‘American Idiot’ to make a statement?” wrote one X user. “That songs been out since the late 2000s! where was the same energy from the night BEFORE where they called out everyone involved in the epstein files?? so disappointed.”
