It has come to light via Mediaite that the hosts of ABC’s The View had a good laugh on Thursday about Fox News hosts’ complaints about Green Day’s anti-MAGA lyrics performed on New Year’s Eve. And after they stopped laughing, they schooled the network on the country’s long history of politically inspired music.
Co-host and Star Trek star Whoopi Goldberg introduced the clip, which showed various Fox News hosts expressing their dissatisfaction over hearing Green Day “talk[ing] smack about the MAGA” and “mimicking exactly what you would hear out of the mouths of [President] Joe Biden, the legacy media and most important, the establishment,” even accusing the punk band of “raging for the machine.”
Goldberg hit back:
“I don’t understand. Do they not know who Green Day is? Green Day has always… Rage Against the Machine? Rage Against the Machine. You are the machine they’re raging against!”
Co-hosts Joy Behar, Sara Haines, and Sunny Hostin then reminded everyone that America’s political music goes back decades:
“Behar: Whoopi, are we the only ones who are old enough to remember a period of time when practically all music was political? The Bob Dylan song “Blowin’ in the Wind” was not about the weather, okay? It was about the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. 1970, “Ohio” [by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young] was written after the Kent State killing. They killed kids like you in the front. The police did it, I believe it was the National Guard, because they were protesting the war. We have have a history in this country of political songs.
Haines: Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” from 1939 about racism and lynching.
Hostin: Rap music is always about the voices of the unheard. Always. “Fight the Power”?”
But even more baffling was what co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin pointed out, that “American Idiot” is not just a decades-old song, it was always a protest song:
“Farah Griffin: But also, it’s like, it’s 2024. “American Idiot” came out 20 years ago. Like you’re just now learning that Green Day is a band that like, goes against…?
Goldberg: I don’t think they actually know who… They’re from Berkeley!”
Farah Griffin continued, calling out the conservative commentators on being more than happy to celebrate politically-laced music that they do agree with:
[Th]e right does have their own figures, like they prop up Kid Rock and like, I guess Vanilla Ice was at Mar-A-Lago…
