By Tom Lanham
photos by Pamela Littky
O
n the On the most instinctual gut
level, Billie Joe Armstrong gets it.
No question. A la cinematic direc-
tor Godfrey Reggio’s 1983 visual master-
piece Koyaanisqatsi, life — nationally and
around the world — has tipped complete-
ly, horribly, maybe irrevocably out of bal-
ance. On one recent day alone, the head-
lines said it all: Freakish, climate-change-
spurred floods are swamping Mississippi
and Tennessee. Post-Columbine school
kids are being subjected to regular Active
Shooter and Lockdown Drills. An embold-
ened post-acquittal Trump administration
is demanding access to private E-mail
encryption. And a gaggle of unlikely
Democratic presidential candidates is awk-
wardly squabbling their way through the
primary season, which some have likened
to bringing a butter knife to a gunfight.
Perhaps creative minds feel this seismic
shift more acutely. Still, we are heading
into dark, dark times where democracy
may no longer be relevant, and artists
could end up being pilloried for their art,
simply because it offends the self-appoint-
ed new king.
But the always-outspoken Green Day
frontman isn’t sitting quietly as the threats
grow more ominous. He and his Rock &
Roll Hall of Fame-inducted trio have
responded with a new Butch-Walker-
coproduced outing Father of All
Motherfuckers, which can be heard as a cel-
ebration of classic Phil Spector-immense
rock and roll influences or — upon serious
study of Armstrong’s visceral lyrics — as a
scathing political diatribe that draws a line
in the sand on the future of humanity.
The record’s title is a phrase
Armstrong, 47, came up with years ago,
something he’s been saving until now. “I’ll
just do a play on words a lot, whether it’s a
22 illinoisentertainer.com march 2020
song or not,” he says. To whom is he refer-
ring? He chuckles. “I think on the positive
side of it, it could be me feeling like I’m the
best,” he replies. “Or, on the negative side
of it, Trump being the worst. We live in a
really scary time, and Trump, to me, is the
most toxic, polarizing politician — not
only in my lifetime — but, I have to say,
since Adolf Hitler. I think he’s very danger-
ous for our country right now, and I think
that Mitch McConnell is even more dan-
gerous.” Extinction? “That’s where we’re
headed,” he sighs. “Whether it be through
climate change or the neo-fascism that’s in
our political sphere right now. But the
thing that drives me crazy is the people
who vote against their own interests. And
maybe they do it because the Bible told
them so, and people switch to religion in a
lot of ways just because it feels convenient
since they can’t get health care. So, as
Stranger Things says, I feel like we’re living
in the upside-down, and we are the crea-
tures that are killing ourselves.” Talking
sense to any opposing viewpoint, a
philosopher recently opined, is useless
because “You can’t reason someone out of
something that they didn’t reason their
way into.”
When Green Day recently appeared on
Good Morning America to debut the rousing
Joan Jett-sampled single “Oh Yeah!,” the
three musicians were in fine form as the
audience sang along with the huge hand-
clap-punctuated chorus. Drummer Tre
Cool sported a new pornstache, bassist
Mike Dirnt wore his muttonchops sculpted
into long, stag-beetle-pincer points, and
Armstrong was still Bowery-Boy youthful
with his perpetually-mussed shock of
black hair. Although he sang the words
clearly in his trademark nasal drone, they
might have been lost on the young crowd:
“Nobody move and nobody gonna get
hurt/ Reach for the sky with your face in
the dirt ...Dirty looks, and I’m looking for a
payback/ Burning books in a bulletproof
backpack... Everybody got a scar/ Ain’t it
funny how we’re running out of hope.”
Afterward, Armstrong even apologized to
show host Robin Roberts for sounding so
dark so early in the day. A la the other nine
stomping tracks on the album, “Oh Yeah!”
delivers its observations like a steel fist in a
velvet glove. Or that spoonful of sugar that
helps the medicine go down.
“And that’s the thing that Green Day
does so well,” reckons Dirnt, who teamed
up with childhood chum Armstrong back
in 1987, when they were both only 15.
“When we’re firing on all cylinders, you
can take our records any way you want to
take them — you can take them at face
value, or you can dig deep into them. And
we don’t need to candy-coat everything,
because it’s not rhetorical. But I think
Billie’s really on-point for a lot of these
songs, but there’s a lot of heavy stuff going
on in the world.”
The always mischievous Cool is more
optimistic. “People just don’t want to
believe what their eyes are telling them,”
he says. “And you can get caught up in
that, and it’ll really turn your day sour. Or
you can almost find the comedy in it and
realize that we live in a crazy, different
time, with the way things are changing so
quickly amid the landscape of social
media, where everybody is a star. It’s a dif-
ferent world out there, but I personally
think that there’s a lot of fun to be had
still.” He pauses, searching for the right
comparison. “It’s sort of like we’re dancing
a jig while the world is burning around
us.”
Armstrong is of a similar mind on the
subject of social media. “You have to take a
break from it because it amplifies every-
thing,” he says. “Not only does everyone
have an opinion, but everyone feels like
their opinion matters. We throw daggers at
each other, and we do things without
thought. Nobody wants to listen anymore.
It’s weird — in 2020, so far, we’ve gone
through an impeachment, we’ve had the
deadliest fires in human history that just
happened in Australia, snd we go through
a news cycle so quickly now it’s insane.”
For example, he explains, Green Day just
played the NHL All-Star Game in St. Louis
for a rowdy hockey crowd, during which
he dropped a few F-bombs from the stage.
“And the next thing you know, we’re
trending just because I said a bunch of bad
words, and I didn’t even have time to
enjoy it,” he says. “I mean, trends used to
last for years, like skinny jeans or whatev-
er. But that’s the world that we live in now.
It moves at the speed of light, and unfortu-
nately, that’s the attention span for what
we go through with tragedy, also. You have
a bunch of school kids who have to start
wearing bulletproof backpacks now, so
where did all our thoughts and prayers go?
They’re gone. At light speed.”
Full disclosure: This writer first met
Green Day in 1994, and I liked them imme-
diately. And over the years, I’ve always felt
big-brotherly proud of Amstrong himself,
as I watched him reason his way out of
some serious situations, like how to handle
overnight success. After interviewing
Adam Duritz at a campus-adjacent cafe in
Berkeley one afternoon, the Counting
Crows singer asked me to tag along with
him to the quad, where a band he knew
was playing a daytime show. And he was
remarkably enthusiastic. “They’re these
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