Green Day's Politics Have Always Been a Core Element the Group's Identity

Following the news that Bad Bunny would be performing at the Super Bowl halftime show, many people wanted to know more about Green Day, the band that has been tapped to open this year's NFL championship game. Although Green Day and Bad Bunny don't have a ton in common musically, both artists have been controversial choices in part because of their politics.

While Bad Bunny's politics are clear, some people might be less sure where Green Day falls on the political spectrum. Here's what we know.

Green Day's politics are avowedly anti-right-wing. While it might be overstating things to suggest that the band is a bunch of liberals, they have long been opposed to politics that they might describe as fascist. Anyone who is surprised by this hasn't been paying much attention. The band's 2004 album "American Idiot" is one of the defining pieces of political art produced during the Bush administration, and it's fair to say the album is not kind to the former president.

In more recent years, the band has continued to make their feelings about Republican politicians clear. During performances of the song "American Idiot," lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong has frequently substituted the lyric "I'm not a part of the redneck agenda" for other, more topical things. At one show, he said "I'm not a part of the Elon agenda," a reference to billionaire Elon Musk.

At another, he said more simply that he wasn't a part of the "MAGA agenda."

It's fair to say, then, that Green Day are not exactly fans of the current president, and the NFL chose to hire them to perform along with Bad Bunny anyway. While some people are not thrilled by the choice, others are more than OK with adding Green Day to the lineup, especially given how different their actual music is from Bad Bunny's.

While it's unclear how long Green Day's Super Bowl performance will be, those who learned that they would be performing are already considering how the performance might make Donald Trump feel.

"Green Day is gonna make him so f--king mad," one person wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter).

"Bad Bunny to p--s off the Republicans in Spanish. Green Day to p--s them off in English," another person added.

While it's unclear whether the NFL chose to hire its halftime talent with politics in mind, it seems clear that plenty of people are reading this choice of performers as pretty explicitly political. Of course, we also don't know how explicitly political each performer's set might be, which could shape how we ultimately think about this slate.

What's undeniable, though, is that Green Day are not huge fans of the Trump administration, and they haven't exactly been shy about that over the past decade. Whether they'll call Trump out on stage at the Super Bowl remains to be seen, but it certainly seems like a more live possibility for them than it would for many other artists.