

It was the most dignified album from a band that no one wanted to be dignified. It was divisive at the time as a betrayal of the pop punk roots of Dookie and Insomniac, but still had plenty of “Greatest Hits” quality tracks that still hold up today.Īnd if you dig below those attempts at political commentary, you get some of Billie Joe’s most personal and relatable music, and in that earnestness the album has aged especially well to a certain demographic. But whenever I think of Green Day getting in on the politics game, I think of the album that came out a year before 9/11- Warning. Hearing that, you probably first think of the Bush-era “American Idiot” and the fanfare that followed. This story stands out to me as a perfect representation of the protest culture that Green Day sang about for so long. Oliver North was not aware of this act of fictional vandalism, nor was Dick Cheney shaking in his boots over it. Nancy Reagan isn’t coming out to pick up the garbage. Someone working a criminally low paying job is going to have to clean that up. Kicking over a trash can made a lot of noise and probably a big mess, but it wasn’t sticking it to any man. It would be a great example of quick thinking on a level even the smarmiest Aaron Sorkin character couldn’t dream of.
#Cast away green day driver
When I ran into former Philadelphia Flyer Jeff Carter on the street, I didn’t say, “Hey, Jeff Carter! What’s hockey?”īut, to paraphrase Chris Farley’s bus driver character in Billy Madison, “You can imagine what it’d be like if it did.” People don’t just walk up to famous people on the street and ask what the thing they do is. The first and most important thing to note about this interaction is that it probably did not happen. Still not grasping the premise despite Armstrong’s concise explanation, the pedestrian did the same, and looked to clarify Armstrong’s point. He looked around, saw a trash can and kicked it over, replying, “That’s punk!”

As the legend has it, Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong was walking on the street one day when a guy came up to him and asked him what punk is.
