America needs a definitive history of Dead Kennedys, and not just because they were an influential punk band. It’s not even because they gleefully jabbed at the status quo of ‘80s bourgeois society. Yes, this was a band that outraged Tipper Gore, was prosecuted for distributing harmful material to minors, and apparently drove Francis Ford Coppola to physical violence. Indeed, before they split up in 1986, DK was good at pissing off everyone, even other punks. But this is not why they are important to our time. Dead Kennedys matter today because, if we don’t now live in the world they described, we at least live in peril of it.
If that sounds far-fetched, just take a look at their lyrics. Anyone who’s read an article about plastic waste polluting the oceans can identify with “Moon Over Marin”, a song that describes an environment so toxic that you have to wear a gasmask to the beach. Years before the Exxon Valdez, Biafra sang, “another tanker’s hit the rocks/abandoned to spill out its guts.”
Biafra’s style of satire often took the point of view of the figures he targeted, and his targets can look awfully familiar. Take, for example, “The Great Wall”, where he argues that fear of immigration (“There’s too many people in your world/and refugees are expensive”) goes hand in hand with racially-motivated urban decay (“We’d rather pay for riot squads/than pump your ghetto back to life”).
And don’t get Jello Biafra started on police brutality. Two DK songs, both inspired by true events, focus on violent abuse of police authority. “Police Truck” tells the disturbing story of officers who rape prostitutes. Biafra drew inspiration from events that transpired around San Francisco in the late 1970s, but the song just as easily recalls the case of Daniel Holtzclaw, an Oklahoma cop convicted of raping thirteen women in 2016. A spoof of Sonny Curtis’ “I Fought the Law” explicitly references the murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, but Biafra’s line, “You can get away with murder if you got a badge”, may resonate with anyone who was disturbed by the death of Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, or any other unarmed African-Americans killed by the police.
Any good study of the past resonates with the present, and a history of Dead Kennedys could possibly illuminate some continuities between the our current time and the time in which DK came of age. Were the seeds of Trumpism planted in the age of Reagan? After all, Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign in Mississippi with a speech about states’ rights. Then again, one can argue that Trumpism can be traced to the GOP’s adoption of the Southern Strategy in the wake of the Civil Rights Acts, or even earlier. Either way, DK’s interpretation of their own era might offer some clues.