Green Day kicked off Super Bowl LX festivities tonight (February 8) at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, where the Bay Area natives played a medley of hits from their 2004 album, American Idiot. Watch Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tré Cool’s performance here.
To tease the set, the NFL first brought out a string quartet to perform Green Day’s sentimental “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” while Tom Brady, Peyton and Eli Manning, Jalen Hurts, and other past MVPs walked onto the field. The camera then panned to Green Day, who launched into their single “Holiday” atop a small stage while a crowd of fans—waving flags, signs, and foam hands shaped like the American Idiot grenade hearts—cheered.
In their usual all-black attire, Green Day moved swiftly into “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and then “American Idiot.” Joining the trio onstage were their longtime touring bandmates, including Pinhead Gunpowder guitarist Jason White. For those who bet that the outspoken punks would use their platform to critique the Trump administration, as they often do, sorry; Billie Joe Armstrong skipped over the second verse of “American Idiot”—where he in recent years has been singing “I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda”—and axed the faux-representative announcement during “Holiday.” He didn’t bite his tongue two days before the Super Bowl, though, when the band headlined a Spotify-sponsored Super Bowl party. Onstage, Armstrong called for ICE agents to quit, claiming that the current administration will “drop” them as soon as Trump’s presidential term ends.
This year’s Super Bowl pregame performers were Charlie Puth, Brandi Carlile, and Coco Jones. Puth had the honor of singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Carlile performed “America the Beautiful” with acoustic guitar, and Jones sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Later in the evening, Bad Bunny played the official Super Bowl halftime show.
Read about Green Day’s “Basket Case” at No. 129 in The 250 Best Songs of the 1990s.