Billie Joe Armstrong, of Green Day, performs “Bang Bang” at the American Music Awards at the Microsoft Theater on Sunday, Nov. 20, 2016, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Matt Sayles/Invision/AP)
Green Day blasted President-elect Donald Trump in its performance at the 2016 American Music Awards (AMA) on Monday.
Before jamming to its newest hit “Bang Bang” from its album “Revolution Radio,” lead vocalist Billie Joe Armstrong led the group in lashing out at Trump and the Ku Klux Klan, an American white supremacist movement. “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA,” the American punk rock band’s members screamed at the crowd. It was similar to one of the iconic lines in the 1982 song “Born to Die” by MDC, which has the lyrics “No war, no KKK, no fascist USA.”
Watch Green Day's full performance from the AMAs https://t.co/tBqMUGQSBZ pic.twitter.com/PsUZvGrSSW
— Green Day Authority (@GDA) November 21, 2016
This is the group’s second appearance in AMA after it played its breakthrough hit “21 Guns” in 2009. Notably, the band was hailed as the favorite alternative artist in 2005 and 2009, and so was its album “American Idiot” in 2005.
READ: Single Review” ‘Bang Bang” by Green Day
This is not the first time the punk rock band–composed of Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tre Cool–frankly spoke out about American politics and the results of the elections. During a performance at the 2016 MTV Europe Music Awards, according to Rolling Stone, it altered the lyric of its 2004 ditty “American Idiot” from “subliminal mindf**k to “subliminal mind-Trump America.” Gianna Francesca Catolico