Green Day has often been treated as a problem in the “longview” of punk: too popular, too melodic, too commercial, too successful. Green Day and the Politics of Pop-Punk starts from the opposite assumption. Green Day matters precisely because the band’s career makes it impossible to separate punk from the mass-cultural conditions it has so often claimed to resist.

This edited collection offers the first sustained scholarly reassessment of Green Day and their place in the history of punk, pop-punk, and popular music. From the East Bay punk scene to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Green Day’s career forces us to reconsider what punk became after its early canonical moments. Their rise in the 1990s turned underground debates about authenticity, selling out, and subcultural belonging into mass-cultural controversies. At the same time, their music gave millions of listeners a language for boredom, alienation, anxiety, sexuality, political disillusionment, and the refusal—or inability—to grow up into normative adulthood.

Rather than rehearse familiar arguments about punk purity, this volume asks what Green Day’s career reveals about pop-punk as a cultural form. Often dismissed as juvenile, commercial, or apolitical, pop-punk became one of the most widely available languages through which late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century youth culture articulated cultural and political critique. Green Day’s oeuvre and publics offer a privileged site for thinking about many of the tensions that have animated pop-punk, and punk more broadly, since its early days, including underground credibility versus mass appeal, local scenes versus global circulation, youth refusal versus nostalgic retrospection, and political dissent versus anti-programmatic refusal.

We invite chapter proposals from scholars working in punk studies, popular music studies, American studies, cultural studies, media and communication studies, musicology, performance studies, gender and sexuality studies, youth culture studies, and related fields. We also welcome submissions from archivists, musicians, critics, journalists, and other writer-practitioners whose work engages punk as a lived cultural practice. Chapters should be scholarly and well researched, but written in an accessible style suitable for students, scholars, and intellectually curious readers beyond the academy. 

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Green Day’s relationship to East Bay punk and its infrastructure
• The contradictions of maintaining punk principles under conditions of commercial success and celebrity
• Boredom, suburban alienation, panic, burnout, anger, disgust, and other “ugly feelings” in Green Day’s affective repertoire
• The politics of pop-punk in the context of youth culture
• Green Day as an entry point into punk, political consciousness, queer identification, or non-normative identity
• Masculinity, vulnerability, sexuality, theatricality, and queer self-fashioning
• The band’s shifting relationship to genre
• The political awakening of pop-punk and the mainstreaming of its politics in the aftermath of September 11 and the “War on Terror”
• The band’s movement across albums, eras, styles, and personae
• Green Day’s (and pop-punk’s) relationship to punk history and punk canon 
• Fandom, intergenerational reception, and nostalgia
• International reception and the repurposing of Green Day’s language of refusal outside the United States
• The performative dimensions of Green Day’s concerts, music videos, Broadway adaptation, and public persona
• The whiteness, suburban coding, and class politics of Green Day (vis-a-vis punk and pop-punk more broadly) 
• Gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, and geography in Green Day’s repertoire and reception
• Green Day’s relationship to other punk, pop-punk, emo, alternative, and mainstream rock acts
• Green Day members’ side projects (The Networks, Pinhead Gunpowder, Foxboro Hot Tubs, etc.)

We are especially interested in chapters that move beyond fan biography or familiar “sellout” narratives to ask what Green Day reveals about punk’s place in cultural history. We also welcome essays that examine the broader range of listeners, identities, and imagined communities through which Green Day’s music has acquired meaning.

Please submit an abstract of 300-500 words, a brief bio of 100 words, and contact information to punkbeyonditsbeginnings@gmail.com by August 15. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by September 15. Completed chapters of approximately 4,000–6,000 words, including notes and bibliography, will be due by February 1st, 2027.

Green Day and the Politics of Pop-Punk will be part of the forthcoming book series Punk: Beyond Its Beginnings, published by Bloomsbury.