STARS AND STRIPES OF CORRUPTION:
Dead Kennedys’ Subversive Critique of the
Reagan Administration and Fundamentalist
Religion in the 1980s
When it comes to influential American punk rock bands, San Francisco’s
Dead Kennedys superseded the punk movement’s “anarchy for anarchy’s sake”
intentions by releasing five controversial and politically charged records from
1980 to 1986. Taken collectively, Dead Kennedys’ works—Fresh Fruit for
Rotting Vegetables (1980), In God We Trust, Inc. (1981), Plastic Surgery
Disasters (1982), Frankenchrist (1985), and Bedtime for Democracy (1986)—
represent a frontal assault on what the group perceived to be a heartless,
dehumanizing, militaristic Reagan administration that was buttressed by
hypocritical and bigoted fundamentalist religion. Calling upon a manic and
cryptic guitar sound, as well as unflinching and brutal lyrics, Dead Kennedys in
the 1980s became the target of censorship by Tipper Gore and the Parents Music
Resource Center and became embroiled in an obscenity lawsuit because of a
sexually graphic poster they inserted into their third album. Accordingly, the
purpose of this article is to provide a reevaluation of Dead Kennedys’ music by
removing it from the stereotypical landscape of nihilistic, purely emotive punk
rock, and instead examine the music within the cerebral framework of an
antifascistic, anticapitalistic, anti-conformist, antiwar critique of 1980s America.
Formed in 1978 and disbanded in 1986, Dead Kennedys consisted of
lead singer/lyricist Jello Biafra (fric Boucher), guitarist East Bay Ray (Ray
Peppemell), bassist Klaus Flouride (Geoffrey Lyall), and drummer D.H. Peligro
(Darren Henley). In a 1981 interview, Biafra summed up his band’s musical
philosophy by stating, “Anybody who doesn’t use art as a weapon is not an artist”
(Fitzgerald 130). The target of Dead Kennedys’ scathing critique was the
robotlike, “business-as-usual,” don’t-question-authority mindset of Reagan-era
America. Dead Kennedys’ music literally dared people to think for themselves,
shun conformism, and to question the established ways of considering organized
religion, capitalism, war, racism, and the environment. From the very beginning
the band billed itself as “antistupidity,” and the members took every opportunity
on stage, in print, and on the airwaves to expound their “vacant stranger theory.”
Biafra described the theory as follows:
People who are more interested in building cocoons for
themselves than in trying to get rid of the problems; they’re
building cocoons to keep out...are the ones most openly proud