The Art of Provocation

With the release of a slamming new Lard CD, Pure Chewing Satisfaction, and the mounting of another legal assault on Alternative Tentacles over an old Crucifucks album cover, Jello Biafra is once again in the media spotlight. Since founding seminal punk band Dead Kennedys nearly 20 years ago, Biafra's outspoken politics have riled everyone from San Francisco mayoral candidates to Tipper Gore (and her PMRC) to the "punk" right-wingers of Maximumrocknroll and Gilman Street. Despite the legal rows and hospital bills, Biafra maintains, "Fucking with the powers that be is a great pleasure for me."
He obviously relishes the struggle and triumph of his self-appointed role as vigilante for American democracy, but also sees his "whole artistic legacy" as "the biggest prank I possibly could have come up with--and it's ongoing." Through music and spoken-word performances, Biafra comments on the state of America the unusual: a country where religious leaders burn giant Easter bunnies for being pagan gods, or men plagued by "the power of lard" (i.e., "fear of looking bad") purchase lumpy arm or pec implants to mirror the models in Calvin Klein ads. "Home is where the disease is," cracks Biafra, "and as long as people continually find new ways to make fools of themselves, I will never run out of material."
He credits his "sick sense of humor" for being simultaneously appalled and amused by everything from over-the-top death-metal outfit Brujeria to the Jerry Springer Show. However, some of his observations are very unfunny. For example, Biafra's convinced that "major labels prefer their artists to be strung out on drugs because that makes them easier to control." He submits, "I can't even count the number of bands I know personally that were drug-free until they signed with major labels and came out the other end hooked on junk."
Some folks deride Biafra's controversial assessments as paranoid. Others embrace his work and it changes their lives forever. Regardless of how you feel about Jello Biafra, you can't dismiss the impact of his efforts on multiple generations of young punks. Yet the artist's success is something of a mystery even to him. "I never thought I'd be able to make a living from my big mouth and terrible attitude," he admits. Well, he has. And here's a little of both to prove why.

What was your original mission as an artist?
I wanted to fuck shit up. If nothing happened I would have been very depressed.

Were you worried about the cops?
Definitely, in places like LA, Orange County, Houston.

What was your most harrowing encounter with the police?
I would say the first one is always the worst. I didn't get beat up by the LA cops when they raided a Dead Kennedys' show in Wilmington, CA, but they just beat the living daylights out of many, many Dead Kennedys fans. It was Rodney King en masse. They were even buzzbombing the hall with helicopters and throwing tear gas in the street. When people exited the hall, all cramming through two double-doors, they had to run through a line of cops on either side swinging billyclubs at their heads. Meanwhile, other helmeted cops in full riot gear were running up and down the streets of Wilmington smashing car windshields and the windows to small businesses.

The cops were?!?
Yeah. And then the Los Angeles Times blamed the whole police riot on us. But East Bay Ray, our guitarist, knew a woman who worked at a local hospital there, who told him that either the LAPD or an LA sheriff's official was at the hospital at 4:30 p.m. that afternoon saying, "You better have more staff in the emergency room tonight. There's gonna be some casualties." There's a whole psychotic goon culture of police departments that's completely out of control.

Are you paranoid?
I hope so. William Burroughs once said, "Paranoia is freedom." And he's right. I would rather know what's going on than just let MTV and The X Files fill up my head with swill and not dig beneath the surface. If digging beneath the surface and pointing out what you think is really going on is paranoid, so be it.

That sounds more like vigilance than paranoia.
That's for you to decide. The more I start regurgitating suppressed information, the more I will be labeled paranoid. If we had a more paranoid country, we wouldn't be allowing ourselves to be run by such idiots today.

Do you think we can ever have a real class war in this society?
There's a class war going on right now.The top is waging a very aggressive class war against the rest of us. That's what ending welfare, as we know it, is all about.

But what about us fighting back? You mentioned in a recent Washington Post article that you think the war on the underclass might actually backfire. Do you truly believe that we can organize enough to fight back and effectively reclaim something of America for ourselves?
Well, I'm hoping so. Michael Moore (Roger and Me, TV Nation) is convinced that the people disillusioned with the American corporate dictatorship are a majority of the people in this country now, but we just don't know it.

And the media doesn't publicize it because they're subsidized by the corporations.
Of course. And so we haven't learned to get along with each other. We don't bury our petty differences and keep our eyes on a common prize the way the corporate and religious right-wing does. As far as I'm concerned, a solution to a lot of [our current] funding crises is non-violent extermination of the rich.

Through taxes?
Basically, yeah. This could be accomplished through the ballot box, pure and simple. Instead of gutting our own infrastructure through things like Prop. 13 and the Clinton-Gingrich regime, why not just cut everybody's income off at a certain amount? Say, for easy mathematical purposes--$100,000--maximum wage.

But that's not gonna fly. Isn't America built on working to accumulate as much wealth as possible, to get whatever you want?
Well, maybe it's time to build it on something else. 'Cause at the moment, since everything's built on what people want, it's slowly falling apart. I think the payback for maximum wage would be more free social services like they have in more civilized countries across the Atlantic, such as free education, free health care for all, hopefully even free mass transit.

So you believe in an across-the-board ceiling because capitalism's gone awry.
Capitalism has gone very awry these days. We don't even live in a capitalistic society anymore; it's feudalism now. We're in the age of new feudalism where old-money families and multinationals suck up and control more of the money and back it up with more and more weapons. Every time we go out and buy one of their products, we are their serfs. That's new feudalism. Maximum wage would be a way to torpedo new feudalism at its jugular vein.

But we choose what we buy.
If you leave the Bay Area and go up to Mendocino County or Sonoma, it's not a matter of choice in some cases. When a store like Walmart or Home Depot or Blockbuster moves into town, a lot of locally owned businesses go under because they're underpriced by the giant national chains. It's not choice at all. It's lack of choice.

You can't be 100 percent anti-capitalism because you run a record label.
Yeah, but it's not done to profiteer as much as possible off the bands and the people who listen to them. Alternative Tentacles is designed to provide an outlet for artists, besides myself, who want to work completely outside the entertainment industry.

I'm all for letting artists do whatever, but you ultimately decide what your label will release. So, what's the point of putting out 7-inch singles by Brujeria, which are riddled with completely gratuitous violence?
The whole Brujeria concept is inspired by Mexican tabloid media, which is several steps further extreme than our own. One of the reasons they have so many gory pictures in magazines like Alarma and Peligro is to desensitize people to the violent society around them.

But what do you gain by putting out something like that?
If we're going to get into death metal at all, we should probably get into the most absolutely extreme, incorrigible band in the world. Some people go so far over the line that they cross from indefensible to defensible.

OK, what about the much-hyped exploitation of Wesley Willis?
I think that's totally ridiculous. I think it's taking the bleeding-heart liberal angle a little too far to say that because Wesley is mentally incapacitated therefore he should not have his music released. That's reverse discrimination. Making music makes Wesley happy and his music sure as hell makes me happy. His angle on the world and on music itself is completely unique.

That's true. But all of his songs are the same. Isn't one album enough?
I don't think 50 Wesley albums are enough. I never get tired of him. Wesley himself gets very offended when people accuse him of allowing himself to be exploited. He feels like they're trying to get in the way with his attempts to survive and make a living. After all, with Clinton and his buddy Gingrich and Pete Wilson ending welfare as we know it, so to speak, there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Wesleys in this country who have lost all means of support. [Plus], there are so many great quotes in Wesley's songs that apply to every situation. As far as I'm concerned, "suck a mountain goat's ass with Cool Whip" is the battle cry of the '90s.

I feel like over the years you've honed a distinctive art of provocation. What advice would you give to fledgling provocateurs who might be interested in delving into confrontational expression?
I would say just stick to your heart and soul and your beliefs. It sounds really generic, but in the age of major-label contracts for bands who've played one gig at the Bottom of the Hill or something, it's worth saying again.

First appeared in BAM magazine 7/25/97
Courtesy and © BAM magazine, internet © Synthesis Network.

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