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Popular Culture Review
'em all your money and they’ll set you free, free, for a fee.
They all claim that they have ‘the answer’ / when they don’t
even know the Question
they’re all just bunch of liars
they just want your money
they just want your consciousness.
In the other song, “Moral Majority,” Biafra’s voice drips with revulsion
and resentment as he bellows:
You call yourselves the Moral Majority
We call ourselves the people in the real world
Trying to rub us out, but we’re going to survive
God must be dead if you’re alive.
You say ‘God loves you, come and buy the Good News’
then you buy the president and swimming pools
If Jesus don’t save ’til we’re lining your pockets
God must be dead if you’re alive.
In fact, many of the religious hypocrisy songs of Dead Kennedys are
philosophically linked to the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Because of his
proclamation that “God is dead,” his insistence that the meaning of life is to be
found on purely human terms rather than within the precepts and doctrines of
Christianity, and his concept of the Superman and the will to power, Nietzsche’s
uncompromisingly provocative works have influenced such artists as George
Bernard Shaw, D.H. Lawrence, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and within the realm of the
punk rock genre, Dead Kennedys are to be added to that list. Three specific
Nietzschean themes thread through the band’s caustic critique of fundamentalist
religion in the 1980s.
First, in terms of decadence, is that an animal, a species, an individual is
depraved when it loses its instincts, when it chooses or when it prefers what is
harmful to it. Nietzsche considers life itself to be the instinct for growth, for
continuance, for accumulation of forces, for power. For Nietzsche, where the will
to power is lacking, there is decline—that is, decadence (1895).
Second, in terms of the “self-deceptive fraudulence” of Christianity, is
that at the core of human decadence and the demise of the individual’s will to
power are Christian values, morality, and doctrines. For Nietzsche, belief in
Christianity is contradictory to life because it has taken the side of everything
weak, base, and ill-constituted. Nietzsche argues that Christianity fears people
who will themselves to the fullest extent of self-actuality. To control anyone who
would strive to attain such self-fulfillment, Christianity, Nietzsche proclaims, has
succeede d in willing “the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick animal