Interview: Jello Biafra (Part 1)

Posted October 15 by Jeanne F.

Logic is a power drill in the hands of Jello Biafra, who places the drill tip right between your eyes. He sings, warbles, chants, and stammers his way through layers of soft tissue in order to pierce your skull and scramble your brains. Ever since founding the Dead Kennedys back in the hardcore heyday of 1978, Jello has been delivering political tirades with ostentatious flair that are as ludicrous as the subject matter itself. Not a whole lot has changed on Jello’s latest album, The Audacity of Hype by Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine, available on Jello's label Alternative Tentacles, which celebrates its 30th birthday this year. We’re still living in an assbackwards clusterfuck of Biblical proportions and Jello still has something to say about it.

When I called Jello for our interview, I was greeted by an outgoing message that was little more than a litany of price tags from modern American wars that add up to the national debt. Trillions of bucks. It leaves one speechless at a most inopportune time. It took me a few seconds to gather my wits and actually leave a message. Jello picked up midway through my dumbfounded introduction.

That outgoing message made me want to jump off a cliff.

Yeah (laughing). There’s an article in the current Rolling Stone—yet another Rolling Stone with U2 on the cover, wow, how interesting—but the article by Matt Taibbi, who was their political writer during the campaign, on how much of that money actually wasn’t real and how even treasury bonds are sold to different people at the same time, thus making some of that non-existing money, it’s just mind-boggling as well as the laundry list of all the people responsible that Obama adopted into his government.

You are at no loss for musical fodder.

If I didn’t have a really warped sense of humor I would have pulled a Kurt Cobain a long time ago. You have to be able to laugh at the complete sickness of the world as well as be fascinated by it.

How old were you when you first started paying attention to politics and government? Was there a point in your life when you were sort of awakened to just how messed up and deceitful government is?

I don’t know whether I found it or it found me. I guess the key was my parents saw no reason to hide what was going on in the world from their kids and so instead of watching some dumb sitcom if the tv was on at dinner, it was often the news. Or even before dinner, I’d watch maybe one cartoon show and then the news would come on and I’d watch both with equal fascination. I saw the Berlin wall go up and I saw Lee Harvey Oswald get shot live in my parents’ living room. I just have a very vivid memory of these things. It comes in handy. I’m amazed at how many people my age did not directly feel the Vietnam war or even the 60s and it’s as much a part of me, if not more so, than the 70s or 80s. I didn’t get to jump in and do all the drugs and cause all the trouble. But I wasn’t far away and I kept up with a lot of it.

So you followed the news through high school when other kids were fucking up and…

But it wasn’t just me, and that’s what amazes me about people, other people I know just forgetting all this from their childhood. Even when we were in like fourth or fifth grade, when we were 9 or 10, everyone had a strong opinion about the Vietnam War. Strong opinions about what a snake Nixon was. Either that or he was this great American or whatever. It also meant I learned very early that most of the world was never going to agree with me and most of them would go through their entire lives with their heads up their ass.

Were your parents politically involved at all?

They were to some degree. My mom was a librarian and my dad was a psychiatric social worker and a poet.

The album is called The Audacity of Hype. Hype, as you presented it in these songs, is a synonym for inertia and the compliance of the American people in the face of all these egregious abuses of power. The songs sound really familiar, really “Jello.” How is the government that you’re singing about now different from the government you were singing about with the Dead Kennedys?

I would say it’s more overtly in your face fascist and we haven’t really come to terms with that. An early punk rock pioneer in L.A. called Black Randy said something in an issue of Search and Destroy—the greatest fanzine ever made—where he said, “1984 happened in 1930 and we’re just now finding out about it.” And this was in 1978. Everything from the Wall Street bailout to the torture of political prisoners to people in this country shrugging their shoulders when they may or may not be under surveillance all the time, it’s just part of an ongoing corporate coup. Only it has a nice smiling Mickey Mouse face instead of a swastika. As long as we can all be dumbed down into happy Wal-Martians, the robber barons can get away with stealing more and more of people’s money. This in itself puzzles me because a lot of those people already have so much money they have no idea what to do with it all. Long ago it just became this little game, so instead of crack addiction we have wealth addiction. The most damaging kind of addiction in the world. So what’s the point after you make your first million? You have all the money you’ll ever need in your life, but it’s like a drug “No I must have more more more, and if it means fucking other people over to get more it must mean I win the battle and I’m good at playing the game and I must keep playing the game and have more more more” and in some cases, they’ve totally lost grasp of what “more” actually means. So they take it out on the rest of us.

The one great opportunity to reverse this and have real change for all the people who invested hope in the man would be if the Obama administration, instead of bailing out the AIGs and Bank of Americas, just gave all that money to the people who owed the mortgages. That way, people could stay in their homes, pay off their mortgage, and the banks would still get their money but the rest of us could continue to taste some semblance of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Instead they just shoveled it down a black hole. It’s kind of like the 1930s the way the media plays this, where there’s always these true crime stories on tv, a kidnapping here, Michael Jackson’s doctor there, throw in a dose of Bin Laden if people aren’t cowering enough while the real criminals, the real crooks, are running around scot-free just like the 1930s—public enemy number one was John Dillinger instead of the greedy bankers who caused the Great Depression. It’s the same way of manipulating people into not storming the palaces.

This could easily have been another spoken word CD. What made you want to make this a music album?

I never quit making music, I never quit making albums, I just had a lot of other adventures. Some good, some bad. Some of these songs date back quite a ways with a lyrical re-write, while others are brand-new. I guess what really made me, was the final pitchfork in my ass was seeing the Stooges on Iggy’s 60th birthday. I almost never go to reunion shows I mean what’s the point. But that one was pretty good and I thought “Shit. I’m gonna be 50 next year. I better get something together for my 50th and if it’s a tenth as good as the Stooges, I’ll declare victory.” So finally I had a deadline. Maybe I should have imposed that on myself 20 years ago (laughs) and I basically did what I should have done in the first place, which was settle for who was good and who was available and started rockin. The first was the Biafra 5-0 50th birthday shows and then we scattered for a while, then got back together, got the album done, and started touring. And spoken word is on hiatus for the indefinite future. Number one, because I want to concentrate on the band and number two, I want to see where the dust settles with the Obama regime so I have something to wrap my little claws around to present to people.

Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine squeeze some invisible oranges

What fans love about your music is how you’re barely holding on to your sanity, you’re choking on cynicism and your own bile. You had a plethora of thematic inspirations to choose from for this album, so how do you decide what deserves your wrath?

The singing style itself is just my way of singing the blues. In some ways, maybe there’s a little more soul in what I do and what I’ve done than a lot of what passes for punk rock these days. I always like widening the base of the pyramid and feel like punk should be about something new. I mean even German audiences were glad we were mostly playing new songs. That was a great relief to me and helped make our tour go really well, plus we all got along. Some people said “We’re tired of all this current events and political shit, why don’t you write something more personal.” This IS what’s personal to me. Plus I never really liked love songs, even as a child. By the time I was a teenager, I realized how much they lied to me and that romance didn’t work that way at all. This was another way of manipulating people into being obedient consumer and the drug at the end of the rainbow was true love which doesn’t really ever quite exist (laughs). Carrot on a stick or whatever. Plus, I’m fed up with all these people who are labeled “emo” by the music press, who moan and groan about how difficult the issues of their personal lives are after their parents buy them a stack of Marshalls and they get signed to a big-time independent or major label. Oh boo-hoo, life is so difficult. I’m thinking “Fine, you want some emo, go beg change on 8th Street for an afternoon, then you’ll feel some emo.”

So rounding up material… it’s more of what winds up getting done. There’s some really good pieces of music that I can’t figure out what to do for words and same with some sets of lyrics that haven’t really found the right piece of music yet. I have, God, I don’t know, a four-foot high stack of lyrics and writing and whatnot, I’ve never boiled down, and hours and hours of singing into cassette tapes trying to come up with cool riffs and play around with them. It’s a very inefficient way to work, but at least it gets results. As Morris the Cat once said, it pays to be finicky. The only time I ever repeated a verse in a song was “Kill The Poor” and after that it got to a bigger problem figuring out what to take out. And then spoken word only made it worse because I could go off on a topic as long as I wanted and it wouldn’t be restricted by a three-minute rock n roll song. There’s a few spoken word pieces that started out as songs and I wound up abandoning the music because there was just too much stuff and it seemed like it would be better to go into a little more detail but with spoken word.

There’s certain areas I want to go into next time around, including people allowing themselves to be more empty-headed and easily manipulated while they think they’re actually ahead of the game such as trolling the Internet for news rather than letting the news find them at random through a printed newspaper or some other source where you google up a topic that you’re already interested in and read reports and blogs by people who already agree with you. Sure it fortifies your side of the argument, but it also makes you ignorant to a lot of other things (laughs).

I increasingly run into people who will call my phone and say, “Oh I saw that you called.” And I’ll say, “Well did you listen to my message?” And they’ll say, “No.” And then I have to repeat the whole thing a second time. The whole thing is passing the buck with emailed notes and texting. I’ll say to people “I’ll write down my phone number for you,” and they’re like, “No no no, email it to me.” WHY? I can write it down for you this minute! It’s all this postponing and passing the buck created this robotic laziness that completely drives me up the wall.

I still have the Net as a major information source even if it isn’t at my house. Buzz from the Melvins once put me on a computer and had me look at rare records on ebay and I thought “My God, six hours later and I’m finally getting tired from this. This could be far more dangerous than television.” That doesn’t mean the whole thing should be shut down, it just means it should be used carefully and intelligently. The whole Soviet communist evil empire was one of many dictatorships that controlled society through lack of information. There was one national newspaper kind of like USA Today called Pravda and was 8 or 16 pages a day of all the news the government thought the people should be allowed to know. Here we’re bombarded with useless information instead. It’s interesting now that I finally got cable tv, to watch these news tickers go across the bottoms of networks like CNN where they’ll hint at something, “So-and-so disturbed by so-and-so” or “Somebody charged with something” and they never define what it is. But then you’ll open an edition of Newsweek or even the local weekly paper and okay here’s the print news you’re allowed to see and here’s the other favorite stories on our website that you’re not allowed to see unless you stare at a screen. This especially annoys me because sitting in the bathtub is about the only time I have to read. That and sitting on the shitter. I’m sorry, I don’t want to take my laptop into the bathroom every time I need to take a crap. There are times when you have to let your brain breathe. I’m a big fan of magic accidents both in music and philosophy. Some of the coolest riffs I’ve ever come up with have just popped into my head for no reason at all. And sometimes I’ll put two and two together and come to a conclusion about something I’ve been thinking about or even something I haven’t been thinking about and suddenly bang! Okay, that’s the punch line for a topic of a spoken word show or something.

Do you have to enforce these breathers regularly?

Not necessarily. I get my best ideas in the bathtub or while I’m driving. I almost never wear buds or headphones. Even riding a bicycle around I rather hear the sounds of the city around me. It comes especially in handy if there’s a fire truck nearby and I’m in the way. Or some dumb clown hauling ass in his Hummer or Cadillac Escalade busy texting somebody on the phone when they should be paying attention to the road.

Click here for part 2 of our interview. It only gets better.

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