Dead Kennedys : Kill The Poor
On September 2, 1980 the San Francisco punk band with the despicable name, Dead Kennedys, released their debut album Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables on the UK label Cherry Red.
"It's one of these up and coming giant independent labels, " Jello Biafra laughed in a Smash Hits interview a few month later. "Their warehouse, offices, everything, is the guy's living room. Which is the best kind to have, however, because that way you get complete artistic control. Which is more important to us than money. We wanna say what we wanna say and say it the way we want it said, and not turned into a 'product' so that we don't recognize ourselves in a year's time."
The songs are played at breakneck speed, but very reminiscent of a UK punk scene that had all but disappeared. What they do offer is Biafra's sarcastic sense of humor. "Kill The Poor" isn't meant to be taken any more literally than Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal".
The suggestion is a neutron bomb could end poverty:
No more welfare tax to pay
Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light
Jobless millions whisked away A
t last we have more room to play
All systems go to kill the poor tonight
The album's release came weeks before Ronald Reagan's election.
"I just couldn't believe it," Biafra said in the same interview. "I just kinda stood there with a blank stare on my face , thinking oh God- it really happened.
"People are gonna be very sharply divided, politically, again in America, and there's gonna be a lot more people listening to what we - the modern, musical, political spokesmen - have to say when we get back."
The album landed #2 on the UK Indie charts and eventually rose to UK#33 on the mainstream album chart, selling numbers that made it a Gold album there. Biafra planned to be a thorn in Reagan's side for as long as it took to bring him down.
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