Green Day Throws a ’90s House Party in New Video for Queer-Affirming Song ‘Bobby Sox’
Throughout the new track, frontman Billie Joe Armstrong switches between asking "Do you wanna be my girlfriend?" and "Do you wanna be my boyfriend?"
Green Day "Bobby Sox"
Nostalgia for the ’90s can be found all throughout today’s music, but when Green Day leans into penning a ’90s-style punk track, it just hits different.
On Friday (Jan. 19), the legendary rock trio shared the music video for their new song “Bobby Sox.” The single unveiled off of their just-released album Saviors, “Bobby Sox” sees the band leaning into its fuzzed-out punk sound with a rocked-out love song in which frontman Billie Joe Armstrong sings to prospective partners — both male and female — in a nod to his bisexuality.
In the grainy new video, Green Day takes over a backyard to throw a daylight rager, as members of the diverse crowd make out, get tattoos, jump off roofs and yes, sing along to the band’s performance of its new track. “Do you wanna be my girlfriend?” Armstrong wails in the final chorus. “Do you wanna be my boyfriend?”
In a statement released with the video, Armstrong said that the group wanted to capture the feeling of their early career with a new song, while also making a song that spoke to queer audiences as well. “‘Bobby Sox’ is one of my favorite songs on the album, it’s the ‘Nineties’90s song that we never wrote,” he said. “It started out being a song I wrote for my wife, but as it materialized, I wanted to switch it up and added, ‘Do you wanna be my boyfriend?’ on top of ‘Do you wanna be my girlfriend’ … So the song becomes a kind of universal anthem.”
Armstrong also spoke about the track in a recent interview with The Los Angeles Times, saying that it felt “liberating” to sing about someone wanting to be his boyfriend. “It became more of a queer singalong,” he said.
Check out the video for Green Day’s “Bobby Sox” below:
