The best known tunes on this album and all Dead Kennedys music are "California: Uber Alles" and "Holiday in Cambodia," in which the Dead Kennedys criticize Pol Pot and show how the Amerikan rulers feel a fraternity with Pol Pot--one that ended in covert military aid to the Khmer Rouge that most of the public still does not know about, because of the propaganda use that Pol Pot has in attacking communism.
The tell-tale sign of this music is speed and hard pounding repetitive guitar riffs. Marketing-wise, punk like this was not picked up by the major labels. It sold through the hard work of independents getting the music off the ground themselves.
The punk of the Dead Kennedys is not for everyone, because of its jarring energy, and the local "scenes" that supported it were everywhere but overly closely-knit or unknown thanks to a lack of corporate publicity, but hard-core definitely made its case as the revolutionary musical form of this age. It's also impossible to imagine grunge or the turn in general new rock since the 1990s without the influence of hard-core bands like the Dead Kennedys, some of which broke up and went on to have more successful conventional music careers with major labels--"selling out." The punk movement signalled to the corporations that they might have competitors arising, so the major labels responded with support for more edgy music, music that handled the "dark" themes of death characteristic in heavy metal, but also other complaints in "grunge."
On the question of form, Jello Biafra, the lead singer ended up making more of a career as a talk radio persyn. On this album "Kinky sex makes the world go 'round" is not a song but something more like a political advertisement by the Dead Kennedys about how the rulers actually find bombing as exciting as many people find sex. In fact, bombing seems to be a replacement for sex in this song, something that many theorists following a radical school of Freudianism believe about fascists. See for example, the movie the "Conformist" on this sort of theme and Adorno's contribution to a book The Authoritarian Personality or Radical Man by Charles Hampden-Turner. MIM disagrees with this school of thought which also includes Wilhelm Reich discussed on our Catharine MacKinnon website. Nonetheless, there is no doubting that the reactionary rulers pursue war with the determination that some people pursue sex. The drive is there for these people to arrange the details of war but not solutions to social problems.
This album also contains a defense of Ozzy Osbourne in "Straight A's" against those who sued him for the suicide of their child. The album jacket points out that teenage suicide statistics were sky-rocketing and could not be blamed on Ozzy. To this day, the reactionaries seem to have two solutions for everything: war or thought repression of deviant ideas. So in the case of 911; even though the reactionaries were in charge when 911 happened, they blame everyone else--the communists, the "unpatriotic" etc. Unlike the anarchist Dead Kennedys, who see pluses and minuses in our school of thought, we at MIM do believe that repression of lyrics may be justified and we especially believe that the production of such lyrics will change when the economy is no longer profit-run. However, we agree with the Dead Kennedys that the whole attack on heavy metal as conducive to suicide is misplaced. There are a lot of things that can be done to reduce teenage suicide, starting with the organization of more sports and club activities for youth but also cutting back on the hypocrisy of the political system that promotes lies for votes and profits.
Something we see in hard-core punk and some rap is the ultra-left idea of pounding ideas into people's heads through music, often at the expense of music completely as in the political commercial. We call this "didacticism." To be sure though, for every band that might occasionally stray into this ultra-left error that counter-productively treats people as too stupid, there are a hundred bands making "right opportunist" errors through obscure, non-existent lyrics designed to say nothing or improve marketing. In other words, didactic music is the lesser error, not the main danger and many who partake in it also produce much clear music that is right on.
The Dead Kennedys are all brains all the way, without reliance on songs of love or cars. Much of their music is sarcastic and it's so sarcastic it rubs off on the Dead Kennedys themselves. So often Jello Biafra sings as someone satirizing himself when he adopts other personae. For example, the whole album title should be read as a "self-criticism" of the Amerikan population, of which Jello Biafra is a member. Along these lines in introducing humor and sarcasm, Jello Biafra often has recourse to a falsetto voice, by which we are to know that something is ridiculous. Jello Biafra's use of his voice and sarcasm mark the Dead Kennedys as distinct from most other hard-core punk bands.
There are not a lot of choices out there yet for music that is both lyrically and musically uplifting. For this reason, we often wish that all Trotskyists and anarchists would go into music where their tendencies toward dreaming would be of more use than in agitation. For people who are going to partake in Amerikan music at all, buying CDs like everyone else, then Dead Kennedys are a must.
"Bedtime for Democracy"
Dead Kennedys
www.manifesto.com
1986
Billed as the last "studio album" of the Dead Kennedys, this album has 21 songs. It's consistent hard-core and the politics are solid.
In this album with "anarchy for sale" the "-ism" words are out in the open. The Dead Kennedys also criticize unnamed parties for acting like churches. "You wanna help stop war?/Well, we reject your application/You crack too many jokes/And you eat meat" say the DKs in "Where Do Ya Draw the Line."
Most anarchists have incorrectly concluded that all parties are a bad thing. We at MIM do not divide over humyn frailties such as eating meat. Our party has cardinal principles based on the overall and largest experiences of building socialism. More importantly, MIM works with people outside the party and we attack anyone who thinks a particular anti-war movement or movement for liberation is the property of a particular organization.
MIM does have a scientific function to play, a role to play that does depend on a kind of scientific elitism that also prevails in the rest of science especially at this moment in history where class society limits experience in and production of science, partly as self-defense of its own existence. Either MIM is correct that such an organization producing scientific leadership is necessary or MIM is wrong. We would say given anarchism's track record of failure in advancing the conditions of the people, anyone with an attachment to reality knows that MIM is correct.
Besides the anti-war songs, we also have on this album another political advertisement, this time for support for apartheid South Africa. (When this album came out Nelson Mandela was still in prison and only whites could vote in South Africa.) It points out that everyone in Amerika was sending aid to the racist police because our corporations and government were giving aid to them. So when we did business with the same banks or paid taxes, we in Amerika were doing our share to prop up apartheid in South Africa.
This album is one of the most righteous possible. We recommend that people give punk like this a try.