Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong reveals why he wants to destroy 'pop-punk'
Don't ever use it around him...
Last updated 18th Oct 2022
Speaking in this week’s Kerrang! Magazine, Green Day singer Billie Joe Armstrong has explained why he wants to annihilate the phrase “pop-punk.”
Last New Year’s eve, the 44-year-old singer took to Twitter to voice his disdain for the genre label his band and many others have been lumbered with.
He wrote: “my mission for 2016? to destroy the phrase "pop-punk" forever”
Asked why he felt impelled to write this tweet, Billie Joe told Kerrang!: “I've always hated the phrase 'pop-punk'.
“I think it's a contradiction in terms. Either you're punk, or you're not. It was not directed at any of the band it's just that it's too singular a term for my tastes."
"I come from a scene where every band was different from the others; it was all so diverse," Billie Joe continued. "No two bands sounded the same. No-one was jumping on one particular sound. We were all different.
“Every good band was into what other good band were doing, and it didn't matter that these bands were very different from one another. In fact, it was important that we were different from one another.
"And now we have pop-punk. And I hate that phrase. It lacks diversity."
Hear Green Day on Kerrang! Radio
Of course, Billie Joe isn’t the first rock star to slam the genre they have been affiliated with.
Way back in 2007, My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way famously blasted emo, telling student website The Maine Campus: “I think emo is fing garbage, it's bulls. I think there's bands that unfortunately we get lumped in with that are considered emo and by default that starts to make us emo.
“All I can say is anyone actually listening to the records put the records next to each other and listen to them and there's actually no similarities. I think emo's a pile of s***.”
Green Day headline British Summer Time Hyde Park on Saturday 1st July 2017.
Tickets go on sale from Kerrang! Radio Tickets this coming Friday (7th October) at 9am.