Coachella, for the most part, presents a welcome escape from the world – 10-plus hours of live music a day in a corporate-lite fantasy land, time delineated only by set lists and tents. But if there was one band who could speak to our political moment, as they unfortunately but necessarily say – who could bring the feeling of resistance, if not actual change, to the desert – it would be Green Day, the US punk band whose seminal record American Idiot stuck a middle finger to the Bush administration in 2004. Though the album is in fact more rock opera of sweeping adolescent feeling than political commentary, the opportunity for concert catharsis, if not actual change, is high; it’s a historically excellent time to scream along to “don’t want to be an American Idiot.”
Catharsis was intermittently on hand during Green Day’s headliner set on Saturday, a muddled affair that, although performed to punk perfection, landed more awkwardly than one would hope. To be fair, the California-based band, formed when frontman Billie Joe Armstrong and bassist Mike Dirnt were in high school in 1987, was dealt a tough hand as Coachella’s headliner follow-up to Lady Gaga, who transformed the desert into a gothic fever dream with a stunning and instantly canonical set on Friday night. And more pressingly, in following the unofficial headliner Charli xcx, who preceded Green Day on the main stage on Saturday with a larger crowd and a tighter grip on middle-finger energy and the color of puke green.
Brat Summer signifiers still abounded in the audience for Green Day, a striking mix of gen X grey hair and gen Z hair gems for Coachella’s legacy act of the weekend. The band seemed not to know which audience to cater to, the old-school fans or the generations raised downstream of Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and split the difference in uneasy fashion from the jump; the set opened with two full tracks from other bands, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody and the Ramones’ Blitzkrieg Bop, with a man in a Billie Joe-styled bunny suit hyping up the crowd – whether a delay tactic or an intentional nod to forebears, it was never clear.
Without intro, the band plowed through 18 tracks spanning 1994’s Dookie to 2024’s Saviors, all delivered with their signature impishness unaffected by time, with standard concert camera work and stock visuals largely rendered in the stark American Idiot color scheme of white, black and red. But front-loading the set with the three American Idiot songs most nostalgically beloved by millennials – the title track (lyrics changed to “Don’t want to be an American idiot / I’m not part of a Maga agenda”), Holiday and Boulevard of Broken Dreams – robbed the 90-minute set of critical buildup and the audience of some fickle attenders. American Idiot would work much better as an exclamation point finale than, say, Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) with an audience member brought up to play lagging acoustic to Armstrong’s impeccable vocals. With few interstitials, minimal intros and no clear delineation between eras or significance, the setlist felt less like a coherent tour through a storied career and more a collection of songs powered through with consummate professionalism.
That’s not a knock on the band members – drummer Tré Cool, sweating off his glitter eyeshadow with relentless pursuit of rapid-fire rhythm; bassist Dirnt, as dogged and limber as ever; and especially Armstrong, whose voice retains a hint of the punk nasality and remains one of the most distinctive and pleasing in American rock music. His singing cut through the volume and any doubts, from throat-scratching scream to rare moments of spare emotion, as in Wake Me Up When September Ends. The grief anthem marked the high point of the show, when Armstrong – still sprightly at 53, eyes still kohl-rimmed and twinkly – summoned the strongest command on an audience he at one point advised to temporarily drop their phone cameras and live in the moment.
Live and yell in the moment, many did, though the show evinced the limitations of a legacy punk rock act as a main stage headliner in the post-Beychella era of elaborate productions. Green Day are seasoned performers with a deep catalog of the loud, the invigorating and the scream-able; they are also a three-piece outfit in their 50s not known for choreography – punk is an attitude and a freedom, after all – with little to bring to the vast main stage beyond absolutely shredding their instruments. In lieu of added staging or guests (a little of friend and occasional co-performer Billie Eilish would have gone a long way), Armstrong relied on classic rock concert tricks for audience engagement – “wave your hands in the air,” a 1-2-3-4 countdown for everyone to jump, pitting sides of the audience against each other in a screaming contest – that ran out of juice by the end.
Still, Green Day delivered on the ultimate mandate of a headliner act: loud, fully absorbing fun. From Basket Case to Brain Stew to Jesus of Suburbia to, yes, American Idiot, the volume was invigoratingly high, the music comforting, the heads banging. And the opportunity to scream along to lyrics of disillusionment and anger as welcome as ever.
