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Rating: "Efficiency and progress/is ours once more/now that we have the neutron bomb/it's nice and quick and clean and gets things done.../So let's kill kill kill the poor tonight!!!".
An exasperated and theatrical voice proclaims these paradoxical verses with senseless joy and boldness.
The voice belongs to the singer of the Dead Kennedys, an auditory outrage, Jello Biafra (real name Eric Boucher), a living outrage. Thus begins the debut album of the Dead Kennedys, accommodating and correct from the name itself...
14 tracks of hyperkinetic, fast, violent, furious punk, in one word: hardcore. 14 shards of glass in the eyes of the fat, bigoted average American philistine. A concentrate of madness, but lucid madness, a rage that is never blind, but infused with cynical sarcasm that makes this work the most ferocious and entertaining rotten fruit ever born from the punk scene. If you have in mind farting bands like NOFX, Lagwagon, and Rancid, go away to jerk off babe, this is not for you...
The main agitator of the group is the aforementioned Biafra, a blasphemous, irreverent, ironic pain in the ass who shoots point-blank at everything and everyone, who inflames his tirades with a fiercely satirical, theatrical, and angry tone, sometimes gloomy as a vampire, sometimes frenzied and cannibalistic; imagine him: a hypervitaminized zombie riding a missile launched at insane speed against your common sense: the boyfriend even mom will like!!
Now, take these four young hopefuls who unabashedly declare themselves "Too drunk to fuck", Jello, East Bay Ray, Klaus, and Ted, and catapult them into Reagan's America of the early '80s, that of born-again Christians and the F.B.I. training terrorists, of corporate deathburger and Dallas and Dynasty, of violent rednecks and caring police. Done? Good, what will be the impact?
Ex.: Sid Vicious trying to explain his reasons to a nice Texan boy with an intelligent look and ending up smashing his bass over his back; quite a mess, in short. And indeed, the Kennedys have given (virtual) punches and taken (real) ones, from cops and Nazis, but they have always managed to get back up one way or another, and the outrage continued skating on the bile of the obtuse.
After the charming initial sketch of cabaret for fools "Kill the poor", it continues with the swift "Forward to death", in which the puzzled Jello poses a few calm objections to the society around him (I don't need your way of life/I can't stand your attitude/I don't need this fucking world/I'm looking forward to death) and cathartically explicates the drive for self-destruction and death that has often tragically marked the history of punk. The grand guignol continues with the frenetic and miniaturized boogie "When ya get drafted" and the demented surf "Let's lynch the landlord", with the obsessive chant of "Drug me" (drug me with vitamin C, with your magazines, with you fuck machines) and the abrasive track "Your emotions".
The level is always very high, and the expressive power of their tirades is truly original, musically supported by the sound frenzy created by East Bay's hysterical guitar, Klaus's often funk bass, and Ted's pressing drums.
From seizure to seizure, we review the lethal and schizophrenic "Chemical warfare", and reach the first peak of the album, the "California uber alles" which became the group's symbol, initially aimed at the neonazi frenzy of Governor Jerry Brown, and then, why not, directly at Mr. President Reagan, supported by a martial rhythm and extraordinary performance, with Biafra's voice looming and menacing. Right after comes the desecrating fake malice of "I kill children", which narrates the singer's perverse murderous desires (I kill children, I love to see them die, I kill children and make their mamas cry) tossed in a stunning sonic blender. Still, three disturbing and subversive sarabands like "Stealing people's mail", "Funland at the beach" and "Ill in the head" (truly desperate) lead to the other peak of the album, the second twisted parody of hits: the derailment train of "Holiday in Cambodia", long and progressively unstoppable, where Biafra imagines catapulting any Western bourgeois student directly into the hell of the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot (it's tough kid, but it's life).
The Kennedys hit the soft belly, play dirty and unfairly, and dedicate themselves as much to the "heads" as to you who read and me who write.
Biafra's language remains always surreal, paradoxical, and ironic, never becoming as heavy as, I don't know, a stoner metalhead's, even when delighting us with such pleasantries. It is a constant, diabolical mockery, a reverse strategy of tension, highly effective, that dismantles, ridicules, and pisses on the false myths of the American way of life, without ever falling into easy rhetoric.
To close the album, the last little gem, or toxic waste, as you prefer, a cover of "Viva Las Vegas" by Elvis, launched at a thousand miles per hour and sung like a psychopath over one of the most amusing riffs I've ever heard. Chapeau. No one is innocent, and no one escapes the caustic destructive euphoria of the group, not even (especially?) the King.
The Dead Kennedys are like a hyena laughing at you with its mouth wide open and drooling; or perhaps it's showing you its fangs?
This album has created a new way of expressing and making music in the world of rock n' roll; the innovation starts from the music, passes through the lyrics to reach the artwork. This is not a hardcore album. This is an album that, together with a few others, has defined what hardcore is.
There would still be many things to say about the Kennedys, about Biafra and his "multimedia" terrorism, but I imagine at this point he would blow a raspberry at my boring talks and scream:
"You're so boring, boring, boring, always tape machine recording, you're so boring, boring, boring, I have heard all this before!!!"
Clear, right?
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