--- title: 10 Questions for Billie Joe Armstrong | TIME description: The punk front man and bandmaster stars in Green Day : Rock Band. Billie Joe Armstrong will now take your questions. canonical: https://time.com/video/MaoCqhAR/ og:title: 10 Questions for Billie Joe Armstrong og:description: The punk front man and bandmaster stars in Green Day : Rock Band. Billie Joe Armstrong will now take your questions. og:url: https://time.com/video/MaoCqhAR/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/MaoCqhAR/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 10 Questions for Billie Joe Armstrong twitter:description: The punk front man and bandmaster stars in Green Day : Rock Band. Billie Joe Armstrong will now take your questions. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/MaoCqhAR/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # 10 Questions for Billie Joe Armstrong > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: 10 Questions for Billie Joe Armstrong [Watch (HLS stream): 10 Questions for Billie Joe Armstrong](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/MaoCqhAR.m3u8) (5:55)  _Published 2010-06-17. The punk front man and bandmaster stars in Green Day : Rock Band. Billie Joe Armstrong will now take your questions._ --- Jul 27, 2023 2:22 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [10 Questions for Chris Rock](/video/zDf2gZYF/) ### 10 Questions for Chris Rock [10 Questions with Joe Scarborough](/video/vsRCjDj1/) ### 10 Questions with Joe Scarborough [10 Questions for Lance Armstrong](/video/dLqzl7sE/) ### 10 Questions for Lance Armstrong --- ## Transcript To want to be an American idiot. Do one nation under the new media. I'm Rebecca Keegan for Time magazine with Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong. Here in Oakland, California, on the band's home turf, American Idiot, the Broadway musical, based on their songs, is nominated for three Tony Awards. And the video game rock band Green Day comes out June 8th. I thought that was great. I love it. Yeah, I know. I almost cried. Okay. All right. On to the questions from time readers. Okay. First question comes from Louisville, Kentucky. How do you respond to people who say that Green Day isn't punk anymore? Have you changed your style in response to naysayers? Well, the thing about punk is in any genre of music or punk, or if it's blues or jazz, there's straight up rock and roll. I mean, there's purists in every side. So once you start going outside of that, then they don't necessarily think what you're doing is, you know, quote unquote punk rock. But for me, I want to be a great songwriter. So, I mean, my my range of of songwriters, my favorites goes for anywhere from, you know, someone, you know, a band like the Sex Pistols to all the way to like Lennon-McCartney. So, you know, that's that's what Green Day is or there are no rules. This question comes from Caitlin C in Independence, Kentucky. She asks, What bands have influenced you? You know, when I really first started getting into music that mattered for me, I would say a lot of Minneapolis bands like Husker Du and The Replacements, and then I think it would be like after that, the Ramones or, you know, the local punk rock scene that we came from in Berkeley, which was bands like Operation Ivy and Cream trying and this great record, a compilation called Turn It Around, which was like the first sort of wave of of the Gilman Street punk band that was coming out of there. So that was a pretty big record for me. Christy Kay in Bedford, England, asks, What made you want to have a Broadway musical adaptation of American Idiot? You know, when we were first doing American Idiot, while we were making it, we always thought it was something very theatrical and it had a storyline to it. So we always thought it should be staged somehow, whether it be in the theater or whether it wouldn't be. We really didn't know how was going to come up. So when Michael Mayer, who was, you know, he did a musical called Spring Awakening, when he called, we took that call immediately. Television Dreams of Tomorrow. We're not the ones that have got a boy. That's enough to argue. What's that been like for you to see your songs on stage? That. It's been surreal. I mean, it's been it's been amazing to hear the different voices, especially hearing women sing your songs, which, you know, you know, I. I didn't know that women sounded that good singing my songs. So, you know, I was fighting for well, it's not worth dying for. It was even better than the way I see them. So and it was just great to see that, you know, to see the sort of the the story that you had in your head, just that it's, you know, that was in the record for American Idiot and suddenly get you know, it's on stage right in front of you acted out in front of you. And it was like it was kind of seeing the whole thing really come to fruition. You know, it was like, this is what what we started with was was the album. And then now there's this stage production and with a storyline and, you know, it's it's pretty amazing. This is a question from Jack Lowe in Canterbury, England. Do you think the musicians have a responsibility to try to have a social or political message in their music? I think the only people that should have a responsibility for singing about social issues or politics or anything like that are the ones that aren't fully about it, you know, or the ones that are preaching, you know. I mean, if you're going to write a song, a political song, it's got to come from the same place where you write a love song. You know, it can't just be some empty rhetoric that you're in a bunch of finger pointing. You have to have yourself involved in it, you know? So it's like when I have a song like Don't Want to Be an American Idiot, I'm talking about myself and what's going on in my country at the same time. How do I fit into it and how do I feel alienated from at the same time? So it's a you know, it's self-deprecating, but it's also trying to empower yourself. This is actually your last question. Why do you never seem to age? Age? Mm hmm. I age. I definitely age. I every single day. You know, as this time goes on, I'm aging. So I continues this there. It'll be in the past. So I think trying to to mentally keep yourself in a place where you still have excitement in your life and it's something and you're always in awe of something and you're always have that thing about you where you're you're dreaming the next dream. I think that's, you know, that's and never resting on your laurels, you know, and not in not going through the motions. And you know, that's to me it's that's the fountain of youth. And as long as nothing to do with the wrinkles on your face or how fat you get or, you know, or if you get gray hair, it's just your zest for life, really. Oh, well, thank you very much. Sure. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"10 Questions for Billie Joe Armstrong","description":"The punk front man and bandmaster stars in Green Day : Rock Band. 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