Entertainment Music Billie Joe Armstrong Claims 'Punk Rock Invented Cancel Culture' and Says Green Day Were 'Outcasts' "The worst thing you could call somebody back then was a rockstar," he says in an all-new episode of Audible Original's Words + Music, titled Billie Joe Armstrong: Welcome to My Panic By Darlene Aderoju Darlene Aderoju PEOPLE, Music Writer and Reporter People Editorial Guidelines Published on April 22, 2021 10:00AM EDT Billie Joe Armstrong. Photo: Greg Schneider Billie Joe Armstrong is reflecting on his early days as a punk rocker. In an all-new episode of Audible Original's Words + Music, titled Billie Joe Armstrong: Welcome to My Panic, the Green Day frontman, 49, opens up about his decades-long career in music and some of his personal life experiences. PEOPLE has the exclusive first listen of the segment, which premieres on Thursday. "I think that punk rock invented cancel culture," Armstrong says with a laugh. "It's like we were outcasts, we were criminals." The star goes on, "You could call me an a—hole, you could call me a jerk, you could call me a motherf—er, you can call me all these things, but the worst thing you could call somebody back then was a rockstar. Like f—ing Jon Bon Jovi or something like that." "It's like, no offense to him, but that was sort of the antithesis of where we came from," Armstrong explains. "So for us, it was like, devastating. It's devastating." Green Day Announce New Song and Album Father of All... — Plus Tour with Weezer and Fall Out Boy "I still feel it to this day," says the hitmaker. "We get people that wanted to fight us, you know. Literally getting in fistfights with people and being banned from certain clubs ... Kinda feeling like a f—ing pariah or something, within our own social group." For the hitmaker, "It was pretty traumatic because you know, I'm a pretty sensitive person when it comes to my relationships with people and some of it, I probably made up in my head or whatever, but it was pretty dark living around the Bay Area [in California] at that time." Billie Joe Armstrong Audible Original cover art. Courtesy Audible Now years later, Armstrong has been nominated for 20 Grammy Awards, winning five of the coveted prizes. Green Day has won the Grammy Award for best rock album for their fan-favorites American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown in 2005 and 2010 respectively. The band has released two Billboard Hot 100 Top 10 hits, and a total of nine Green Day songs have been named on the list. The group's 2005 track "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" earned their highest peak position, at No. 2, and charted for 36 weeks. In 2004, their Grammy Award winning album American Idiot peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and charted for a whopping 143 weeks.