Dead Kennedys

With the Dead Kennedys, hardcore grew up. Their stage antics were no less demented than those of other bands of the era, but they carried a clear political (leftist) message and showcased structures and melodies far from crude.

The Dead Kennedys were San Francisco’s main “criminal” punk band. Formed in 1978 by guitarists East Bay Ray (Ray Peppernell) and 6025, they soon fell under the influence of singer Jello Biafra (Eric Boucher), born and raised in Colorado, heir to the politically engaged tradition of the Bay Area, who became the moral voice of the Californian punk movement. To the troubles caused by the band’s outrageous name, Biafra added his political activity as a left-wing radical.

Their frenzied punk rock was an effective vehicle for projecting the image of militants: a relentless rhythm section combined with the thrash-punk guitar arsenal, and a vocal style sharpened by the underlying vice of spitting on everything and everyone. The outrage arises from direct, mocking satire rather than a real ideology: Biafra’s goal was simply to parachute the average spoiled everyman into the middle of a civil war in Cambodia, a clear misrepresentation of Mao’s program of sending intellectuals to the countryside. They attack the system and its main representatives with paradoxical slogans (“Kill the poor!”, “California Uber Alles!”), forming the basis of their acts. In short, they positioned themselves as the Fugs of punk.

Their first album, Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables (Cherry Red, 1980 – Manifesto, 2005), contains fourteen tracks in rapid succession, all hurled at breakneck speed against a wall of guitar noise. The dominant idiom is a fiercely hyper-kinetic agit-prop music-hall style, pairing D.H. Peligro’s (Darren Henley) comically frantic drumming with vocals steeped in scornful cynicism: Kill The Poor, When Ya Get Drafted, Chemical Warfare, Funland At The Beach, Lil’ In The Head, and the demented surf tune Let’s Lynch The Landlord, all detonated by brutal bursts of ferocity.

The classic instrumentation, with guitars pushed to the limit and scratched over the thick and jagged bass lines (Geoffrey “Klaus Fluoride” Lyall) paired with pounding yet inventive drumming (Ted Slesinger), produces highly musical tracks—between waltzes, tangos, and funky staccatos—distorted more by energy than harmonic structure.
But the Dead Kennedys are not just social agitators. In their tense and desperate songs, they also reflect the existential crash of their generation, as in the scream of one of their most furious tracks, Forward To Death (“I don’t need this fucking world… I’m looking forward to death”), which often spills over into gratuitous, self-indulgent assaults on common sense, such as the catalogue of tortures in I Kill Children.
The album’s peaks are the two demented anthem parodies, the biting and sarcastic California Uber Alles and even more so Holiday In Cambodia, a perverse, epileptic bolero turned into a powerful, threatening curse—one of the most compelling tracks of the punk era.
Biafra yells proclamations at the top of his lungs, surveying chemical and nuclear war, neo-Nazism, governors and presidents, Vietnam and Cambodia, computers and newspapers. This “Independent Voice of the American Punk Left” has the air of a ‘68 veteran, a maximalist activist grappling with his own extinction crisis.

In 1981 they moved to England, where they had to adjust to the prevailing dark tone. Biafra even recorded a gothic-mood mix dedicated to a witches’ sabbath, while the group as a whole continued unabated in churning out blasphemies such as Too Drunk To Fuck, a new goosebump-inducing anthem, or Nazi Punks Fuck Off.

Plastic Surgery Disaster (1982) confirms the playful pace, Biafra’s “grand-guignol” vocals, Fluoride’s funky bass, and Valium’s fiery bursts as elements of a perverse, nihilistic music hall—a Biafra who inherited the role of comic minstrel of dirty, wicked America from the Fugs and David Peel. Exaggerated, didactic, raw, the Dead Kennedys retain the crown of the West’s most outrageous band, but their bacchanals now struggle to produce other memorable chords (Moon Over Marin and Terminal Preppie).

Frankenchrist (1985), as well as the subsequent Bedtime For Democracy (1986), is a broad parodic fresco of American society. Biafra draws on current events to lampoon the entire nation and the junk culture that now forms its foundation: Stars And Stripes Of Corruption, MTV Get Off The Air, This Could Be Anywhere, and Police Truck are the most caustic sketches. Politics, however, has decidedly taken precedence over music.

The Dead Kennedys’ ultrapunk is not just relentless punk noise; it is capable of unusual stylistic openings (with hints of vaudeville and 1950s TV shows), always twisted by an appropriate injection of vampirism. Biafra’s emphatic, theatrical, and outrageous singing is primarily responsible for this form of punk “defamiliarization,” increasing its impact.

From outrage to outrage, Biafra eventually ran afoul of the law, and his trial (1987) became historic. Although he was pardoned, it marked the end of an era.

Jello Biafra then embarked on a prolific solo career.

The Dead Kennedys’ bassist, Klaus Fluoride, also pursued a respectable solo career, first with the album Cha Cha Cha (Alternative Tentacles, 1985) featuring the punkabilly My Linda, then with the more experimental Because I Say So, largely instrumental, before sinking into mediocrity with The Light Is Flickering, which was intended to be inspired by Brian Eno’s rock albums.

In 2000, Biafra was sued in court by the other band members. They won the case, but suspicion remained that the lawsuit was retaliation for his refusal to grant the rights to Holiday in Cambodia for a blue-jeans advertisement.