Punk rock has been around long enough to hold within its musical boundaries a slew of albums considered both classic and essential. We here at Dying Scene love and appreciate these classic albums, but every once and a while we have the urge to challenge what the community has deemed sacred. Every Saturday, two Dying Scene writers will square off head-to-head and either attack or defend one of these so-called classics. Up for slaughter today is Dead Kennedys‘ “Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables.” Does the 1980 classic hold up today? You be the judge. Carson Winter will be defending and Dustin Gates will be attacking.
The Defense
As a modern punk, there’s more music at my disposal than I could ever possibly listen to. When I’m not keeping up with the latest releases, there’s a thirty-plus year catalog of classics to keep me occupied. It’s not entirely fair, I admit, as those seminal classics have to compete for attention with the very bands they inspired; and unfortunately those classics can come off as an unrefined punk rock Neanderthal in the comparison. So, in my mind, when I say Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables is one of my favorite albums, it means something.
The album opens with vocalist Jello Biafra’s trademark trill, declaring “efficiency and progress is ours once more, now that we have the neutron bomb,” and in my mind, there’s no better way to start an album. Dead Kennedys were the beginning of a second wave of punk, a movement already aware of its roots and stylistic traits, but this time around willing to subvert them even further. The song is “Kill the Poor,” a personal favorite of mine, and on it we see how far punk has advanced since its inception. The surfy guitars, corrupt with distortion, mock the beach-ready tunes they once represented. Even the Sex Pistols, as furious as they were, couldn’t match the delicious venom Biafra spews in every song. What the Dead Kennedys understood was that humor is the highest level of communication, and on Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, Biafra uses humor (and specifically satire) to create a viciously angry and sharply pointed record. For me, this is when punk rock got smart. Drawing on Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” the gist of “Kill the Poor” is the ridiculous concept of ending poverty by killing the impoverished (with a neutron bomb, no less). Dead Kennedys take shots at conservatives and liberals alike (mocking the latter’s habit of using celebrities to give weight to a cause), all the while painting a darkly hilarious picture of American politics.
This is, of course, the album that features two of Dead Kennedys’ most memorable tunes: the oft spoken of “Holiday in Cambodia” and “California Uber Alles.” Both songs feature Dead Kennedys at their catchiest, and Biafra at his most visceral and hilariously offensive. But, it’s guitarist East Bay Ray who truly shines on these tracks, kicking out speedily picked sinister surf rock riffs that are as much a hallmark of Dead Kennedys sound as Biafra’s warbling vocals.
“Drug Me” is a hardcore track with some awesomely dark guitar interludes that serves as a reminder of just how moshable the Dead Kennedys were. Jello Biafra’s rapid fire delivery follows the rat-a-tat-tat tempo of a machine gun as he laments modern society’s culture of overstimulation. “Chemical Warfare” is a more melodic track, with a classical hardcore shout along chorus. Perhaps one of the most unhinged sounding songs on the entire album, it opens with some wonderful guitar work courtesy of East Bay Ray, who impressively goes from palm-muted chugging to surfy riffs at a drop of the hat. The song is worth it’s runtime alone just to hear it’s bizarre circus tent inspired bridge and the atonal barrage that follows.
Uncharacteristically, “Ill in the Head” is a more abstract and personal song from Dead Kennedys. Usually distancing himself from his material with humor, Biafra breaks convention and writes confessionally. He sings, “I want my own home/ I want my own girl/ Help me hate the world/ Own and love my life,” hinting at a sadness and longing behind the wit and vitriol. To me, this is the most revealing track on Fresh Fruit, and possibly the most honest.
The Dead Kennedys were something special, a volatile cocktail of wits and musical brawn and to this day their debut album stands as a bar raising classic. They were ahead of their time, easing punk into musical cross pollination before hyphenated sub-genres became the norm. They had a hand in creating hardcore, one of the most recognizable and distinctive punk movements to this day. Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables is something special, an album worthy of its legacy.
The Attack
Given that my stance is going to be an unpopular one, I’d like to preface my attack by stating that I don’t actually dislike the Dead Kennedys’ debut album per se. From a musical standpoint, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables is an incredibly solid, very surfy influenced, punk album- even I can’t deny the band’s ability to meld aggressive music with such catchy melodies (or I could try, and I would be rightfully called an idiot for doing so). Nor can I say that Jello Biafra’s sarcastic snarl isn’t equally as brilliant as the band’s music, if not more, because I’ve actually always liked his delivery. So what’s my problem then?
The lyrical approach has always been a bit hard to swallow.
When it comes to being a political band, there are generally two routes that can be taken: you can write songs with blanket statements about the government that never really say anything in particular, or you can write songs that are a very specific critique of the things you bear witness to. The pro to the former route is that those songs can be somewhat timeless, although you also run the risk of being criticized for barking empty slogans (a lot of Anti-Flag criticism seems to come from that angle). Writing specific songs about what’s wrong with the government usually results in better songs, but the downside is that as the specific target of the song becomes a thing of the past, the song becomes dated and its impact hits less and less hard.
Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables falls mostly into the latter camp, with Biafra’s lyrics targeting the world that he saw around him… in the late 70’s. Fans who have been around since the band’s inception might listen to these songs with a fond (or bitter) nostalgia, but anyone younger than that might have to break out their history textbooks in order to understand the allusions or metaphors. I’m not against learning history– if anything some of the lyrics are a great catalyst for a bored-with-school 15 year old punk rocker to learn a thing or two (I sure don’t remember learning about the Lily-White movement from my history class). But just knowing about history is different from actually having experienced it, and the impact of the song will still be altered simply due to the fact that some people just weren’t there.
Not every song on Fresh Fruit has been affected by the passing of time. Tracks like “Chemical Warfare” and “Let’s Lynch the Landlord” are eerily relevant even now, some thirty-odd years after their release, and they’re still great songs. But there are moments during Fresh Fruit’s half hour runtime during which the lyrical angle will fall flat and become a victim to history. “California Uber Alles” is often regarded as one of the band’s best songs, but from a lyrical standpoint do Jello’s perceived politics of Jerry Brown in 1979 really mean anything to anyone in 2013? (I’m aware of the irony in calling attention to this song when Jerry Brown is currently serving as Governor of California once again, but also bear in mind that Biafra himself has said that he was a bit off about Brown). The same could be said about “Holiday In Cambodia”, another Dead Kennedys classic- does the imagery of Pol Pot’s Cambodia really strike as heavy as a chord with listeners today? Mockery of the pseudo-intellectual college type is always funny, but there has to be an updated way of doing it.
As I said earlier, I actually think that Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables is a good album, but I also think that it’s become slightly dated in its 30+ years of existence. In spite of my less than impressed attitude, I admit that there are still some fantastic tunes (in addition to the previously mentioned songs, “Kill the Poor” and “When Ya Get Drafted” are also noteworthy), but a handful of songs does not make for an entire classic album. It’s true that the only faults I can find with the album mostly lie within the dated lyrical references (although the sequence of “Stealing People’s Mail”, “Funland at the Beach”, and “Ill in the Head” is pretty weak too), but those faults still weigh it down heavily. Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables might have its place in somewhere in history, but it’s going into the future kicking and screaming. As far as truly understanding what makes Biafra such a great lyricist younger listeners may be better off listening to the Guantanamo School of Medicine– you get all the sarcasm and wit that he’s known for, but with references to and critiques of events of the modern world.
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