Dead Kennedys

There’s a great clip of Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra on the Oprah Winfrey Show from around 1990, arguing with Tipper Gore. He’d recently come off an obscenity trial for the band’s album Frankenchrist, one of several albums targeted by Gore’s activist group, the Parents Music Resource Center. (The charge was not, it should be noted, for the music itself, but for the poster it came with: a reproduction of an H.R. Geiger painting called Penis Landscape.) Not that the trial—which ended in a hung jury—really matters, he says. This isn’t about punk rock. It isn’t even about free speech. It’s about making a bogeyman out of culture in an effort to build a broader conservative agenda. Gore protests that they’re only there to help busy parents figure out what their kids are listening to. Right, Biafra says—that’s the worst part: You’re praying on the fears of parents too chicken to talk to their own kids. There’s a stunned silence. Then cheers. Formed in San Francisco in 1978, Dead Kennedys aren’t just one of the first American punk bands, they’re the first who made their politics inextricable from their music. Their humor can make them seem nihilistic: “Let’s Lynch the Landlord” (“turn the oven on, it smells like Dachau, yeah!”), “Kill the Poor” (“no more welfare tax to pay!”), “Holiday in Cambodia” (“where the slums have so much soul!”). But peel back the layers and you hear the sound of a generation trying to reckon with the myths they’d been sold—about Vietnam, about opportunity, about race, class, justice, and morality. So while their dips into Americana sound sardonic (surf-rock, boogie, covers of “Rawhide” and “Viva Las Vegas”), they also mask a basic disappointment that America isn’t the country their parents, teachers and politicians had promised. Once asked whether he thought their name was in bad taste, the band’s guitarist, East Bay Ray, said, yeah, it was. But the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy were in worse.