Green Day performs at the Coachella Stage during the 2025 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at Empire Polo Club on April 12, 2025 in Indio, California.
Kevin Mazur/Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Coa
The legendary Bay Area pop-punk outfit Green Day surprised a Coachella crowd when the group’s singer swapped a song lyric to make a brief statement about Palestine.
The band played a triumphant headlining set at Coachella on Saturday, marking the climax of the festival’s second day. Like most Green Day concerts, it included a few heartwarming moments of crowd participation, with frontman Billie Joe Armstrong inviting fans onstage to sing and play guitar (a young woman named Brooke earned big cheers for singing “Know Your Enemy”). Then near the tail end of the band’s set, Armstrong changed a lyric in the song “Jesus of Suburbia” to allude to the war in Gaza.
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“Running away from pain like kids in Palestine,” Armstrong sang, during a quiet moment in the song, drawing cheers from the audience. (The original line is “running away from pain when you’ve been victimized.”)
In Green Day concerts, it’s standard for Armstrong to swap out song lyrics to make political statements. Typically, Green Day focuses on national politics, with recent lyric changes taking aim at Elon Musk, Vice President JD Vance and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. However this isn’t Armstrong’s first sign of support of Palestine: in February, he held up a Palestinian flag at a concert in Malaysia.
At the start of the band’s Coachella set, Armstrong swapped the lyrics of Green Day’s opening track, “American Idiot,” to declare, “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda” — a common substitution for that song. Otherwise, the group held back from making any political statements.
The set took place just an hour after Senator Bernie Sanders surprised the Coachella crowd when he stepped onstage to introduce the indie pop artist Clairo. “The future of what happens to America is dependent on your generation. Now, you can turn away and you can ignore what goes on, but if you do that, you do that at your own peril,” Sanders told the audience.
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On Friday there was another big political moment, as the livestream for the Irish rap trio Kneecap’s performance cut out while the group led a chant about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The group claimed on X that the livestream also omitted its statements on Palestine.
“Not the only thing that was cut,” Kneecap wrote in an X post, “our messaging on the US-backed genocide in Gaza somehow never appeared on screens either.”
Saturday was Green Day’s first time performing at Coachella. Lady Gaga headlined the festival on Friday, and Post Malone will headline on Sunday.
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