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Popular Culture Review
metaphorical cancer devouring the conscience of America. For Jello Biafra, East
Bay Ray, Klaus Flouride, and D.H. Peligro, the Reagan administration
represented nothing short of a kakistocracy—that is, government by the worst
men.
The denial of human rights during the Reagan years as a recurring theme
in the music of Dead Kennedys expressed itself quite jarringly in the 1981 song,
“We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now.” Biafra sings:
I am Ronald Reagan
bom again with fascist cravings
still you make me president.
Human rights will soon go away
I am now your Shah today
now I command all of you
now you’re gonna pray in school
I’ll make sure they’re Christian too.
California Uber Alles, Uber alles California.
Klu Klux Klan will control you
still you think its natural
nigger knocking for the master race
still you wear a happy face.
You closed your eyes
can’t happen here
Alexander Haig is near
Vietnam won’t come back you say
join the Army or you will pay.
California Uber alles
Uber alles California.
In analogizing President Reagan to a Khomeini-like Shah or to a
Hitleresque leader, Dead Kennedys are engaging in a longstanding practice of
protest in rock music, although admittedly pushing the boundaries of taste and
propriety to the breaking point for many listeners. Biafra himself has
acknowledged that this type of subversive political critique is simply a
contemporary version of the genre of protest rock, noting: “During the ’60s Dylan
and other artists did protest songs with acoustic guitar. We’re just the modem
equivalent—only louder so more people will hear us” (Fitzgerald, 1983, 59).
Biafra points out that even the selection of the band’s name was an act of political
protest: “Our name was meant to call attention to the beginnings of the ‘me
generation’ which started with the Kennedy assassinations, because the Kennedy
assassinations torpedoed the American dream. America growing bigger, better!