Green Day and Bad Bunny

The Super Bowl is just around the corner, and we’re all counting down the days until Bad Bunny causes a massive MAGA meltdown with what we’re sure will be a defiant halftime performance from an artist who has seasoned beef with President Donald Trump. As if the whole thing couldn’t get any juicier, the NFL just announced that they also booked Green Day to perform the Super Bowl opening ceremony ― the punk rock band that fueled our anti-imperialist teenage angst.

If you know Green Day’s music, then you understand how significant and potentially strategic the choice to have them perform at the opening ceremony is. Their most overtly political song, “American Idiot,” was an unapologetic anti-war banger and a critique of Bush’s America, an era that actually seems pretty chill compared to present-day Trump’s America. And they’re pretty consistent in their lyrical advocacy.

Green Day has already called out Trump explicitly in the past. In a 2016 VMAs performance, they chanted, “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA” loudly and crisply onstage during the televised event. As one social media creator pointed out, the band has never been shy about their political stance and frequently adapts lyrics during their live performances to reflect what’s currently going on in our country.

The choice to have Green Day open is existentially hilarious in the context of Bad Bunny’s performance. Ever since the NFL announced that the Puerto Rican singer would be headlining the halftime show, some conservatives have made sure to let everybody know just how angry they are about
When the halftime show announcement dropped last September, Benny Johnson, a conservative commentator, was outraged that Bad Bunny has “no songs in English.” Bad Bunny’s anti-ICE stance has also been widely critiqued and painted as “anti-American,” with wildly uninformed people on social media calling for him to be deported.

In one absurd video, conservative podcaster Tomi Lahren asks journalist Crystal Ball what she thinks of someone who is “not American” performing at the halftime show, to which Ball immediately points out that as a Puerto Rican, Bad Bunny is, in fact, American. The racist pushback got so bad, that the NFL had to publicly address the calls to cancel Bad Bunny’s performance.

Now, the NFL has gone and booked a band that is the type of “American” many of these commentators seemed to have asked for. They sing only in English, are white, and if we’re being real honest, could come across as MAGA-coded if you just saw them walking down the street.

The punchline, of course, is that they appear to be just as anti-Trump as Bad Bunny is, which means this could be one of the most momentous, powerful and politically charged halftime shows in recent memory.

The Green Day and Bad Bunny double slay will come during a particularly volatile time, even by American standards. Trump has deployed murderous ICE agents in Minneapolis, threatened to invade Greenland à la World War II, and toppled the Venezuelan government to seize control of its oil. Trump has even threatened to deploy ICE agents at the Super Bowl, although the White House admitted there’s no tangible plan on how that’s going to happen. Whether or not that happens, now is a time when many Americans feel powerless to change the ugly trajectory our country is on, but at least we can throw dookie at bigotry on the biggest stage in America.

original article on Huffpost