Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading some books from the 33 1/3 series, specifically Nick Attfield’s on Dinosaur Jr.’s 1987 album You’re Living All Over Me and Michael Stewart Foley’s on Dead Kennedys’ 1980 album Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. Each has been thoroughly engaging, and Attfield’s writing serves, in a lot ways, as a master class on writing about music while Foley’s does an excellent job on detailing the national, state, and local politics and culture that lead to the formation of the Dead Kennedys and their debut album. At some point, I may write about Dinosaur Jr.’s sophomore album, but today I want to look at the Dead Kennedys’ punk classic.

Punk, for me, has always been an escape. I came of age during the mainstream punk breakthrough in the mid-1990s with Rancid and Green Day, both hailing from the East Bay in San Francisco. I didn’t, at that time, do much research backwards, instead being drawn to bands coming out of Sub Pop and other indie labels. As I got older, I started to work my way back to the foundations of punk, finding the Dead Kennedys. Since then, I’ve always found their work to be profound, even with their, as Foley puts it, “gallows humor.” It’s the humor and the posturing, the in your face reality, that makes Dead Kennedys the Dead Kennedys. It what makes them punk as fuck.

Over the course of his book on Fresh Fruit, Foley details the late 1970s milieu that birthed the band. He details the battles of California’s Proposition 13 which slashed property taxes and to budget shortfalls that caused the closure of services and the loss of jobs. He details the battles around Question 6 (the Briggs initiative) which would bar gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools. He details former SFPD officer and San Francisco Board of Supervisor member Dan White’s murder of Mayor George Moscone and fellow board member Harvey Milk. (The cover is actually from the White Night riots following White’s reduced sentence.) He details the rampant police brutality enacted by the SFPD, specifically against the young punk scene. He details the ways that future senator Diane Feinstein, who served as San Francisco’s mayor after Moscone’s murder, used her ties to real estate to jack up rent and evict people from their homes. He details the I-Hotel raid in 1977, where the 400 police kicked out 150 elderly Filipino and Chinese immigrants while punks and other protested. All of this, and much more, lead to Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables.

Punk speaks truth to power. It, like any art, calls out hypocrisy and oppression. Punk creates community, working to form a community of individuals who support and help one another. Foley points out the Dead Kennedys spoke truth, and in speaking that truth, they came from “a place where beasts (in the form of illegitimate authority) doing wrong were named, a place where not only the band, but you — the fan, the peer, the fellow critic — cut through the ‘bullshit’ that seemed to dominate American life.” We, along with the band, become active participants when we tell Nazi punks to fuck off, when we express fears at a fascist regime under governor Jerry Brown (or fill in any other name), when we call out the moral majority and Christian fascism, when we express our fears at serial killers stalking the streets, when we can’t afford our rent because our landlord has priced us out of our home, when scream at individuals who abuse their authority and attack us for no reason.

The Dead Kennedys did what Jello Birafra did in his 1979 mayoral campaign against Diane Feinstein and one year before the debut of Fresh Fruit. During the campaign, he stated that on the campaign trail he wanted to “take a particular issue and illustrate it in the most maniacally graphic way possible to let the people decide for themselves what they think about it.” He, and the band, didn’t want to provide individuals with the answers, with what to think. It’s not the schlock rock that the band lampooned at the 3rd annual Bay Area Music Awards where they played in front of radio/stadium bands and records executives from the area, including Journey and the Knack, as well as director Francis Ford Coppola. Through “Pull My Strings,” they got some in the audience, whom they were ridiculing, to sing, “Is my cock big enough, is my brain small enough, for you to make me a star?”

The Dead Kennedys, like all good art, “effectively [hold] up a mirror to their respective audience, pushing [us] to consider [our] places within a system that privilege[s] profit and power over decency and justice.” The prime of example of this mirror comes across in one of their most famous songs, “Holiday in Cambodia.” The song calls out individuals, specifically college aged individuals, who move about the world without being aware of the politcail and social situation that surrounds them. It calls out who I was during that period in my life, an individual who just cared about the moment and myself, my own desires. I was politically unaware, not paying attention to anything locally, statewide, nationally, or internationally. I was the kid who had “been to school for a year or two” who thought they had “seen it all.”

I thought I knew about the world. I thought my way was the right way, and I’d be damed if I let anyone tell me it wasn’t. I wasn’t the kid who played “ethnicky jazz” or bragged about knowing “how the n***** feel cold and the slums got so much soul,” but I was the kid who thought I was owed things. I felt like I knew the world, but I didn’t know shit, but I’d be damned if I wouldn’t argue up and down that I knew something, even if what I thought I knew was blatantly wrong. “Holiday in Cambodia,” using dark humor, calls out who I was in that period, telling me I should go to take a holiday in Cambodia and work under the authoritarian regime of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot. It’s a song that calls out one’s apathy and tells us to stand up and react, to call out abuses of power, to speak truth to power, to grow a spine.

Art, as I’ve written about before, grows out of resistance and confirms our existence and belief if a better world. It confronts those who seek to divide us. It confronts those who oppress us. It confronts those who abuse their power and have their boots on our necks. It, as well, shines a bright mirror to our very beings, calling upon us to do better, to create a better world. Punk, through its abrasiveness, does all of this, and the Dead Kennedys, throughout their oeuvre, do it as well. The Dead Kennedys birthed Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables out of a milieu where they saw and experienced abuses of power, where they saw the rich getting richer and pissing on those beneath them, where they saw the myths and promises of America fade into the air, where fears of nuclear war flowed through the currents of society. They stood up and made their voice, and the voice of others, heard in the face of all of this, and for that reason, they remain a reminder of the power of art to resistance and imagine who we can and should be as a society.