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There's always room for Jello
By Billy Schear
wschear@mscd.edu

Photo courtesy of alternativetentacles.com Jello Biafra: America’s favorite dessert or America’s favorite political poet?

Standing on a makeshift platform on a street corner spewing acid-laden sermons was once the traditional way to get one’s point across. Now, however, it’s far more lucrative to release that vitriol as a comprehensive album.

Many musicians have crossed over to the art of spoken word, from Black Flag vocalist Henry Rollins to pimp-turned-gangsta-rapper Ice-T, but few seem to embody the business of turning on people’s minds through public speaking like Jello Biafra.

Biafra is perhaps best known as the eccentric former frontman for the Dead Kennedys, a highly influential political punk band of the ’70s and ’80s. The Dead Kennedys were legends in their own right. Shows sometimes erupted into full-scale riots, while Biafra provoked fans with his wild stage pantomiming and lyrics that often took the first-person perspective of the people or groups he scrutinized.

In 1979 Biafra ran for mayor of San Francisco, coming in fourth out of 10 candidates, and in 2000 he was a Green Party presidential candidate, selecting Mumia Abu-Jamal – a prisoner and former death-row inmate – as his running mate before losing the nomination to Ralph Nader.

In the Grip of Official Treason, Biafra’s eighth spoken-word album, cracks open the case files of many of today’s most pressing political topics. His slightly effeminate voice sounds almost cartoonish as he sardonically states his rather serious points. Proving to be quite a liability to the opposition with his well-researched facts and opinions, Biafra covers a plethora of subjects such as the war in Iraq, voting fraud and Schwarzenegger’s governorship, to name only a few examples from the album’s three discs.

The simple fact that people still show up is what keeps Biafra cranking out the commentary.

“I don’t try to present myself as somebody with the same muckraking skills as Greg Palast or the depth of knowledge of Noam Chomsky,” Biafra said. “I just try to say what’s on my mind, and hopefully it will light some fires under people’s asses.”

Biafra ensures that the fire spreads far and wide by casting light onto Alberto Gonzales’ confirmation as Attorney General and Ken Salazar’s shepherding Gonzales’ nomination through Congress.

“I mean, the excuse was he’s a fellow Latino. Well, yeah, so was Augusto Pinochet, so are the Salvadoran death squads that are now coming back. It doesn’t mean I’m going to support George Bush because he’s a fellow Caucasian. That’s insane,” he said.

Despite being an active member of the Green Party, Biafra explained that when he goes to the polls, he votes on what makes sense rather than on what the party line dictates.

“I learned long, long ago not to label myself an anarchist, a socialist, a Marxist or a Libertarian or whatever, because my full points of view, issue by issue, don’t conform to any of them,” Biafra said.

Misinterpretation has plagued Biafra throughout his career. One graphic example was when the Dead Kennedys toured West Germany in 1980, and the audience thought that “California Uber Alles” and “Kill The Poor,” two iconic songs off of the Dead Kennedys’ first LP, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, were armchair Nazi anthems. Biafra expressed his disappointment regarding the misunderstanding, since he felt the lyrics, although tongue-in-cheek, were bluntly clear in their meaning. The incident now encourages him to be as clear as possible when opening up about his views.

Biafra often turns to the music of friend Wesley Willis, an underground phenomenon from Chicago, when fighting off the dejection caused by current affairs. Willis suffered from schizophrenia but still managed to release more than 50 albums.

Biafra reminisced over the death of Willis, who succumbed to leukemia in 2003. He described an incident in the funeral home in which he was the last to leave and, realizing the chance would never come again, leaned into his old friend’s casket and gave him a series of head-butts in their ritual fashion.

“Say ra-ra bonk! Say ra-ra bonk! Say ooka-booka, ooka-booka bonk! And then it occurred to me: What the hell am I doing? Here I am standing there crying, while I’m saying ‘ooka-booka’ and head-butting a corpse. Even in death, Wesley lifted the black cloud away,” he said Americans and all their ridiculousness are a constant source for Biafra’s material, and as long as the absurdity keeps flowing, Biafra assures he will remain near.

“People in Europe always ask me, ‘If America’s really this horrible, why don’t you leave?’ I say no, no, I’m fascinated. I live in the most demented country in the world right as the whole empire is falling, just like Rome. Why live anywhere else? Home is where the disease is.”